Yey! Again

Nice to see the Armstrong Athletic of the NFC on the wrong end of some revenge for the 49ers in Seattle. Doesn’t the 49ers’ quarterback look very like a young Aaron Rodgers! He obviously has the right genes for the job.

Yey!

27-24 in favour of Miami in New England, 2 seconds left on the clock, the Patriots at their 36. Total shambles when they throw the ball about a bit before the Dolphins jump on them to beat Armstrong Athletic and avenge the Massacre in Miami in week 2 of the season. Who sez the Age of Miracles is past!

Miserable strike rate

Of the Top 20 TV Shows of the Year, I watched . . . none at all of them. Where were Starsky & Hutch and the other recycled oldies which people actually watch?

You can’t win

That’s a very strange story about the Bremoaner lawyer, who happened to have a baseball bat handy to slay a fox, which was trying to kill his chickens. What sort of rules give preference to a wild animal over domesticated animals? Or does the RSPCA get off on the publicity of things like this? Probably, just that.

Alternative viewing

Boxing Day was another TV dead loss. Out of the DVD collection came Them! – gi-ants terrorizing America,, which had created them with its atomic bomb tests. And then Scanners – David Cronenberg’s interesting take on telepathy with just the one exploding head; and starring Patrick McGoohan, I was reminded

Here’s a thought

Maybe, if you don’t watch anything on any of the BBC channels on a particular day, the sods should be obliged by law to refund three quid of your licence money. That would be very popular! Are you listening Boris and whoever takes over from Oh, Jeremy Corbyn?

Alternatives are available

Nothing worth viewing on Xmas Day TV, but that’s what CDs and DVDs are for. One of the DVDs I viewed was The Valley of Gwangi – cowboys & circus folk versus dinosaurs, a mad professor and some nutty Mexican peasants. Shame about the cathedral. And no ads!

Not just Cousins to blame

It’s all very well quoting the statistic that the QB of the Minnesota Vikings has never won a match on Monday Night but he’s just one member of a team. Okay, an important one, but it’s that team which has provided collective failure on those Monday nights.

Double Doink

If the kicker in an NFL match can bounce the ball from one post to the other when trying to kick an extra point, that should be worth three points without a doubt. And if he can hit both posts and the crossbar, that should be worth the same as a touchdown. Talent should be recognized.

Wild West show on Sunday!

The Dallas Cowboys @ the Philadelphia Cowboys last night on TV? Don’t believe anything you get from the Virgin Media TV remote’s INFO button without checking it.

Still Armstrong Athletic

Shame that Mr. Edelman is following the New England Patriots’ path of shame. After a pathetic attempt to pretend he’d been injured whilst committing pass interference, he crawled off to the dressing room. Only to return to run about on the pitch totally okay a little later. You ain’t foolin’ no one, buster.

One they missed

How have castanets managed to escape a ban like clapping, which Snowflakes want outlawed in favour of racialist Al Jolson impressions? If someone is upset by clapping, castanets must sound absolutely terrifying!

Another of life’s mysteries

You have to wonder what was going through the mind of whoever it was who cast a Bride of Wildenstein trout-pouter clone in the current Pantene hair advert.

No samphire, Shirley

The Department for Brexit will be axed after January 31st? Well, of course it will be. It would be utterly perverse to keep it when we’re out of the EU.

Rights for all apply to all

If someone wants to get chopped about and drugged up and made to look like a member of the opposite sex; and has the cash to do pay for it; fine. But they have no right to expect everyone else to treat them any more seriously than any other type of eccentric. Because that infringes the human rights of everyone else.

Tories take heart?

It looks like Labour has nothing other than entitled duck eggs on offer as a new leader. Especially if they have to get the obligatory spell of female leadership out of the way.

What a weird world our judges are creating

If a firm can sack someone for expressing the belief that there are only two genders, it follows that firms can also sack someone for expressing the belief that there are more than two genders. It’s only fair!

Well done, Mr. Brees

Great, isn’t it? The receivers do all the work and the quarterback gets all the credit for the passes they catch and the touchdowns they score. A new touchdown record for Drew Brees on Monday night; but somewhat diluted by all the NFL rules changes that made life easier for the offence over the years.

Another swindler

They don’t call them Global Warming Swindlers for nothing. Even though the train company had given her a free first-class ticket, Greenhouse Greta couldn’t resist being pictured sitting on her luggage, trying to look neglected. A trick she learnt from that other swindler Oh, Jeremy Corbyn?

Too much to hope for?

A judge is referring the testimony of Fujitsu computer experts to the Director of Public Prosecutions as they helped to convict Post Office postmasters of imaginary cash shortages created by their allegedly robust accounting software. Will they ever appear in the dock? Breath not being held.

One or the other

It’s all very well for Labour’s Shadow Chancellor to blame his crazy spending plans for the lost election but he put his name to them and he tried to sell them. If he didn’t know they were rubbish, he’s an idiot. If he did, he’s a crook.

NFL High and Lowlights

1. You have to love it when the ball drops into the hands of a linebacker called Merciless and he takes it back the other way for 88 yards.
2. Why doesn’t the NFL make the Dallas Cowboys buy some bloody big curtains for those annoying bloody windows on their dome?

A triumph of optimism

Mince pies with an expiry date in the middle of January? Like they’ll last that long!

Advance warning

100 Xmas Shows You Can’t Miss? There are . . . is . . . one that I might watch. Saving countless wasted viewing hours over the next couple of weeks.

Standards haven’t collapsed completely

It’s reassuring to know that others have no sympathy for the unemployed scrounger with 7 kids who was doing a whinge about food banks. It’s possible to feel sympathy for the kids but not for the parents who were willing to breed them without being able to feed them.

Pointless pillocks

What exactly is the point of ‘hundreds of activists’ descending on Whitehall to protest about the Conservative election victory? Like anyone’s going to say: “Oh, sorry, did we get it wrong? What would you like us to do instead?”

Phew, Gov!

After the last election, it was possible to draw two conclusions: 1. It’s disturbing to know that 50% of the electorate are idiots; you never know when you’re standing next to one; and 2. It simplifies things greatly to know that 50% of the electorate are idiots; you can just treat everyone you meet as one and leave it up to them to prove they aren’t.
    After this election, it’s nice to know that the idiot count has gone down a bit, if only temporarily.

I’m more discriminating, mate!

I must have read or re-read around 500 books in the last decade. How many of the top 25 alleged best-sellers? None.

More Corbyn crap

A kid parked on a hospital floor – obviously, the doctors thought someone else was in a worse condition. Not a judgement that has anything to do with the prime minister and any Corbyn who says different is lying, as usual.
    The kid survived his ‘ordeal’ and his dad was none too pleased by Corbyn taking the kid’s name in vain. Typical!

Grab it and run

Actress Miriam Margolyes asks what’s a Jewish legsbian like her, who hates Xmas, doing playing a nun in an Xmas Day TV show? Cashing in and taking the money, would be my best guess.

Pretty anonymous bunch

Of the 15 ex-Labour MPs who have banded together for a ‘Corbyn ain’t fit to be PM’ advertising campaign, I have heard of . . . 3 of them. Maybe 4.

The last resort?

We’re hearing so much baloney from J. Corbyn and his gang about what’s going to be free in their post-election paradise; wi-fi, university education, TV licences and ghod knows what; it’s amazing they haven’t promised freedom from Tax for all British subjects with only foreign companies paying any.

All action

That was some score festival in New Orleans yesterday. 48-46 in favour of the San Franciso 49ers. Sometimes, no lead is safe south of the border.

Highly likely. Not.

What planet are those alleged Royal correspondents living on if they expect us to believe that Prince Andrew, who flew choppers in the Falklands war zone, would stand still for a wigging from Big Brother Chuck over the Epstein allegators?

It’s the way they tell ’em

That TV ad promising a one-in-ten chance to win this Xmas? Hmmm! A 90% chance you won’t win this Xmas? Not so hmmm.

More yellow dusters on the green stuff

Isn’t it time they started throwing flags when a player claims, falsely, that an opponent didn’t make a catch or get in to the end zone? It’s blatant unsporting conduct but something the NFL seems determined to turn a blind eye to.

New world record?

What’s the big idea behind Channel 4 letting sacked Commons squeaker Berko do a Xmas message like the one the Queen does? An attempt to get the smallest Xmas Day TV audience ever?

Out of it

We have one very lucky cat at the mansion. It is now persisting down with industrial quantities of rain but she managed to stroll in about 30 seconds before the serious stuff began!

TV Tripe

You don’t half hear some tripe on the non-drama TV channels, like PBS America. People on Hawaii had their homes burnt to the ground by a volcanic eruption in 2018. Never mind the sympathy; more fool them for living on an active volcano.
    And in the adverts; when did the elephant become ‘one of our oldest friends’? I can’t say I’ve ever known one. Or that I know any people who have elephant pals.

Include me out

Having seen the lists of BBC 1 and ITV 1 Xmas and Boxo Day TV offerings, I shall be looking in the DVD cupboard for inspiration if I feel a need to gawp at a screen on those days.

What’s different about this election

In the past, Labourites thought they had a licence to lie about anything that took their fancy. This time, they think they’re under an obligation to lie about absolutely everything.

Wrong in one direction only

President Putin has it in for Wikipedia, which he claims is full of inaccuracies. His solution is to create a Russian on-line encyclopaedia full of Russian’s version of everything and Russian fake news. An improvement? Hardly.

Boring . . .

Prince Andrew being sleazed again? File it under NTB**. Now we’ve had the accusations, any danger of something resembling actual proof? A period of silence until that is forthcoming would be appreciated.

** Not That Bothered

Crapman – total BS

Batman vs Superman with Batman written as a pissant hissy git? And the Incredible Kryptonian Hulk doing a King Kong? And Blunderwoman? Definitely an episode to file in the landfill black bin and forget. That’s two and a half hours of my life I won’t get back.

Updated quotation

There is no such thing as a bad Picasso. Some just rake in fewer millions than others.

Sunday Sensation

Did the Almighty Armstrong Athletic Patriots field their B-Team on Sunday? They certainly got stomped on by the Texans. Great trick play by the Texans in Q4, and it was nice of them to go to sleep to make the game look closer than it really was at the end.

Just gab, no sense

The idiot shouty bloke at Sky F1 was calling today’s last race of the season the last of the decade! Apart from next year’s races, of course. Someone else who left school without a maths O-level?

Catching up with the recordings

Oh, my turkey-leg. Three on-side kicks recovered by the Falcons on Thanksgiving Thursday! [Even if one was wiped out by a penalty, the re-kick was an action replay.] But there wasn’t much the Dirty Birds could do for their home crowd against the 4-sack Saints. Lots to cheer there.

How do you know it’s really cold?

The wheelie bins freeze shut and you can’t put anything in them, as they did last night.

Stop flogging it

Do we care that some woman is claiming she gave Prince Andrew a naked tune-up at the Palace? The horse is dead, the outrage tank is empty and we can’t be arsed to confect a refill. Time to move on.

Serious bloke warning

What’s my ambition in life? To be the last person in the country who’s never worn trainers when not in training.

Think petard, hoist, own

The thing about Friday is it’s the day at the end of the working week (for most, until Labour brings in a 4-day week) and it last just 24 hours. Thus I don’t feel tempted to get involved in Black Friday sales on the ground that the people running them are too dim to grasp the concept of Friday. And mostly too crooked to offer genuine bargains, according to all the exposés.

Animals are people too

“There was nothing in the slasher’s eyes, he was just like an animal,” is a description of a crazed Islamist. Which is a gross libel on animals. When I look into the cat’s eyes, she’s usually telling me, ‘Hello.’, ‘Open this door.’ or ‘What’s that bloke up to now?’

Doesn’t stand up to scrutiny

“Superlative of bad”, the crossword clue said. But is there really anything super about the baddest of the bad?

Fiction, faction, who can tell?

Even if she didn’t have Alzheimer’s, one wonders if Barbara Windsor would watch the bio-TV show about her and wonder if it’s about a real person. Such are the liberties taken by the people who make these ‘real-life historicals’.

The clue is in the name

CarpetRight wood flooring? Doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that it’s within their area of expertise. Neither does their ad for vinly flooring.

Not bothered, mate!

When I asked the cat if she was feeling anxious about the approaching Festive Season, she just looked at me. Which means there’s at least one creature on the planet who has the right perspective on Xmas.

No wonder they’re called Commoners

It’s impossible not to feel some sympathy for Prince Andrew, who has been chivvied shamelessly by tiresome plebs in pursuit of their own agenda and self-promotion.

Something else broken

Bad news about the latest incarnation of Charlie’s Angels. After spending zillions of pounds on the latest production, the producers are finding that cinema audiences have something better to do than pay good money to watch their efforts. Replacing the smart and fairly non-violent Angels with a bunch of kill-crazy ninjas cum James Bond wannabes might have had something to do with it. And poor old Bosley now has to identify as female.

Broken barometer?

We had some weird weather yesterday. The sun was shining when I was out and about. But when I glanced at the barometer in the hall, I was surprised to see that the needle had sunk below the ‘R’ in ‘RAIN’. Work that one out!

Where Corbyn went wrong

He’s promising to steal everything irrespective of whether or not it’s nailed down, but our PM wannabe has slipped up. He failed to add facilitating free movement by creating an army of pothole fillers to make the 49% of British roads that are crumbling driveable upon again.

Advertising logic

How can a Black Friday Event (yesterday was Friday November 22nd) run for 10 more days and end on December 2nd, which is a MONDAY? Somebody with very little contact with the real world came up with that.

Tell ’em anything, it makes no difference

Corbyn’s “grab all the cash” election manifesto proves that you’d have to be certifiable to vote Labour. Unless you’re a nutcase or a scrounger. Unfortunately there are a lot of both about.

Pronounced ‘Luxury Yacht’?

If it were possible to feel a little sympathy for someone as undeserving as Jeremy Corbyn, it would be over the outrage confected over his pronouncing the name Epstein as a German word. Like Einstein. Where’s Monty Python when you need him!

I wonder what this was about?

From the next room, it sounded like the young lady doing the TV advert was saying: “Broncostal, strong and testicle.” The ads you make up yourself are always exceedingly better than the real ones.

Definitions for today

Scrawpedo – the cat in a restless, climb all over the furniture mood.

Another of life’s surprises

My local lifeboat crew is facing their toughest Xmas ever, according to something the postman dropped off today. Which is rather strange. We’re 86 miles from the sea and I had no idea that we had been awarded a lifeboat.

Just a break from the election?

Did anyone other than the news media watch the disastrous Prince Andrew TV interview? No one I know did. Still, all the subsequent frenzy spared the politicians the need to make up some new lies until later on in the week.

F1 gets cute

What could Formula One do to liven things up in Brazil? Wipe out the usual suspects! Thus Bottas retired making smoke and Vettel shunted his team mate and crashed out both Ferraris. Cue a safety car with 5 laps to go and Mercedes pitted Hamilton off the podium. And when he crashed his way up to 3rd, he was awarded a penalty which dropped him to 7th.

Brain disengaged

What is the point of showing a MotoGP plug during a CFL match broadcast after the MotoGP season has ended? BT Sport is run by zombies.

MotoGP gone with a bang

Riders off all over the place in the last Moto3 race of the season, then a red flag on lap 3 of 23 for a bike on fire at the side of the track. It was all action in chilly Valencia. And more disasters in the 15 laps following a quick restart; the biggest caused by the new champ dropping his bike in front of a crowd.
    Alex Marquez, the Moto2 champion, also fell off, but on his own. Zarco had a real horror crash in MotoGP. A fair number of others also hit the kitty litter. But this year’s champ, Marquez Senior, stayed on his bike for another win.

NFL lowlights

You have to wonder about the moral compass of the people who condense a 3-hour American football match into an hour of TV when the incident from Thursday Night Football that gets the most screen time is a crude assault.
    It would have been legitimate to show a Cleveland Browns defender bashing the Pittsburgh Steelers’ quarterback with his own helmet, which the defender had ripped off, once in live action and again as a replay.
    But showing it half a dozen times with lots of pontificating steps over the border to voyeurism and rank bad taste. One stoopid assault was not what the match was about – namely that the Browns now have a team which can beat the pants off the Steelers after decades in the doldrums.

History repeating itself

I’ve just finished reading Goodbye To Berlin by Christopher Isherwood and I can’t help thinking how like the Berlin of the 1930s we’re getting with the thought police and the outrage confectors banning everything which upsets them, as the Nazis did in 1933. All we need is a National Corbyn Socialist government to complete the cycle.

Just meaningless

The Department for Counting Beans has decided that Britain became 5% more anxious last spring over Brexit. Which means what? Most people weren’t bothered, some drama queens were throwing major wobblies and everyone else was somewhere in between. Which doesn’t exactly tell us anything useful. But then, that’s not the point of counting beans.

Useful? No more!

Something useful that has disappeared recently is the little plastic lids, which used to be provided with cartons of supermarket cream to close them once the seal of plastic foil has been removed. Sainsbury’s seem to think that not providing them any more will save the planet. Another sign that the private sector is not immune to corporate stoopidity.

No cash, no point

I’ve just had a statement of charges (overdraft, etc.) from my bank covering the last year. With £0.00 in every category. It’s the first one I’ve ever had and a sign that the relentless march of pointless government-imposed burrocracy will never cease.

How brief are they?

I keep being asked if I want to accept briefings and notifications during casual visits to the internet. Just how much time to these people think I have to waste on their propaganda? And how long will it be before being briefed and notified becomes compulsory by law?

And another thing

“Lexa, how sad do you have to be to take advice from a gang of wise-guy piss-taking eavesdroppers in the United States?”

PC consequences

‘Manifesto’ – that’s a gender-specific word which will have to go.

No, thanks!

The Daily Mail is offering a diet that means you will NEVER crave cake again! No more cakes and ale? Life won’t be worth living. No way.

Oh, for some intelligence

The worst executed concept of the physical world has to be friction. Things you want to move get stuck. Things you want to stay put skid off in a random direction. Intelligent design? No chance!

Gloss that flakes off easily

A new premiere every day! Wow, gosh, how brilliants. Hold on, though. What if it’s a film I don’t want to watch. Not all that wonderful after all.

Also fair

No matter how much you hate Labour and the Corbynists, there is nothing wrong with a potential parliamentary candidate slagging off Tony B. Liar.

Only fair

If the boss of McDonuts had affairs with two fellow employees, shouldn’t he have got a pay-off of double the going rate? That’s £42 million.

The digital turns stroppy

“Lexa, what’s the time?”
    “Look at your watch, you bloody parasite.”
“Lexa, what’s the weather right now?”
    “Look out the window, you lazy slag.”

Misplaced confidence

After transferring a bar of dark chocolate to my chock tin, I had a look at the expiry date on the wrapper before disposing of it. APRIL 2021. Like that bar of chock has any hopes of lasting beyond the start of next week!

Politics the easy way

About the only good thing about this election is how little time you need to waste on it if you know that everything you hear from Labour is a lie and everything from the Liberals is bollocks. And everything from the BBC is Labour propaganda.

The wibble goes on

Of the BBC’s list of the 100 Best Books in the history of the Universe . . . I’ve read 11 of them. Pretty crappy list, huh!

Empty gesture

I’d boycott McDonuts for its cruel & unusual dismissal of the British boss for upsetting American Puritans . . . only I’ve never been to one of their junk food parlours and I have no intention of visiting any of them in the future.

Take your pick

Anyone who thinks being single is being self-partnered has failed to grasp the meaning of the word partner, has multiple personality disorder or is an actor desperate to be noticed, if only by being a clot.

Not exactly missed

Formula One has really lost its gloss if I didn’t even think of watching the GP in the USA on Sunday and I didn’t realize it had been run until I saw a picture of Hamilton in champion mode on the back page of Monday’s paper.

Art & Dosh

An interesting pair of thoughts: can an insurance company be done for charging a premium for £50M worth of insurance on a painting by an art forger? And can the company be done for fraud on the grounds that there’s no way it would pay out the 50 million if the painting were to be stolen or destroyed?

Diversity demand

Still on American football, how come there are no earlier Americans in the NFL? No Running Bear the running back, no Heap Big Trouble the linebacker. It’s an amazing omission.

Imagination lacking

How come no one every gets an authentic American name like . . . gopher? J. Gopher Montana – what a great name for a quarterback!

Imagination too strange!

We’re quite used to seeing black American footballers with weird and wonderful names, but a white kicker playing in Saturday’s match at Wembley called Ka’imi!! You have to have really weird parents to be stuck with a first name like that!

More melting

Just solo crashers in Moto 2 from lap 1 onwards and everything became much more strung out and less frantic. Brad Binder stayed on his bike to win, followed home by world champion Alex Marquez. In the MotoGP race, Viñales kept out in front and didn’t let the other world champion Marquez mug him at the last corner for the win.

Melting in Malaysia!

I was just thinking how civilized the Moto3 race in baking hot Sepang was when bang! three of the leaders gone in a crash. And two more riders tangled a lap later. Basher Binder also came off but rejoined. Then another 3-way crash at Turn 4. This is more like the Moto3 we know. And a great finish by the champ.

Double standards

The BBC luvvies are going in for Death By Unpersoning by pretending that the Daily Mail doesn’t exist. Not one mention in a Now Show! sketch about the decline of paper copies of newspapers. Presumably because the Mail doesn’t think their hero, Oh, Jezzer Corby, is the bee’s knees.

Wrong standard

Is it damning that Jeremy Kyle wound up contestants on his ITV show then edited out the wind-ups? It would be if anyone was pretending that he was making documentaries. But all he was involved in were ITV entertainment shows. So that was okay.

Tripe-hounds come out for Halloween

Only the National Union of Students could call wearing a sombrero to a Halloween event racist and mocking Mexican culture . . . is not strictly true. There are lots of other gangs of morons who would go along with this daft idea to get themselves noticed.

A real pal

It’s really nice of President Trump to encourage his mate Nigel Farage to do the decent thing and prevent Corbyn and his evil gang from buggering up Britain. He’s an ally worth having!

Same old, same old

Having viewed the 2019 Mexican Grand Prix recording at last, I’m glad I did it on fast forward as I was spared the shouty bloke’s fake excitement and nothing much happened. Apart from the British bloke winning this year, which is only right and proper, even if his foreign team mate kept this year’s title out of his hands for the moment.

Broking stock

I’ve been looking up the meaning of some common terms in the stock industry to be able to talk to my broker. Here are some good ones:
LEVERAGE -- System for removing cash caught in the fingers of suspicious customers
APPRECIATION -- What brokers fail to show after taking all your money off you in exchange for shares which nose-dive
ARBITRAGE -- Legalized way of betting both ends against the middle
ASSET ALLOCATION -- Diversification of investments for risk management purposes, such that the lion's share ends up in the broker's hip pocket
AUTOTRADER -- Computer program which lets an amateur investor blow his savings without having to press the buttons himself

Too much TV time, not enough new material

One disadvantage of having a Sky channel dedicated to Formula One is finding enough new stuff to put on it. There are lots of gaps, which have to be filled up with repeats, which can confuse the unwary. I recorded what was described as the Mexican Grand Prix, only to find out that what I ended up watching was the 2018 race, not this year’s race! Oh, well!

Pull the other one

Was the NFL Sunday Night Football really a rematch of Super Bowl 1? We’re over half a century away from the original, all the players and coaches are different and so are the rules. Rematch? Not even close, mate!

Top quality

I’ve just started another trip through the box sets of the series Life (2 seasons) starring Damian Lewis when he was very young. Just about the best short TV cop series ever made!

Artificial summer cheer

On the positive side for autumn, if you have a window that has a view of tall trees 20 or 30 yards away, when the leaves go yellow and red, it created the appearance of sunlight hitting the trees. So that only when you look out the back door do you see rain coming down from a leaden sky.

Trying not to laugh

The French illusion that they’re the best cheese-makers in the world has been well and truly shattered. They didn’t win any of the top prizes @ this year’s World Cheese Awards do, and American and British companies did.

Don’t trust bankers

Is it cynical to note that the ‘for three years’ has been dropped out of the euphoric reports that Barclays bank has done a U-turn on post office access to cash in its accounts? Or is the fuss going to happen again in two years time, or maybe even one, if Barclays think they can get away with it?

Commercial cynicism

Barclays bank has a weird view of public relations. It has binned its plan to stop customers from accessing their cash at post offices following a wave of protests. But it plans to fish the plan out of the bin again in three years’ time. Presumably, hoping that all the old people who’ve been making trouble have croaked.

Definitely not us, Gov

Despite the efforts of the anti-British usual suspects, 39 Chinese people dead in a container in Essex is not something the UK should be apologizing for. That was down to problems in foreign countries and foreign criminals making our country a dumping ground for their messes.

Eye-catching daftness

Seen Up North: “Great water every day . . . used water taken away”. I wonder how much United Utilities paid out for that wonderful slogo!

Striving for originality?

Who on Earth had the daft idea of putting vampires in Mandarin drag and making them move about in kung fu films with bunny hops? Some real weirdo!

Things you learn from watching TV

Face-man of the A-Team was a bad guy on Charlie’s Angels in his spare time.

Read faster!

“Airliner blazes . . .” Crumbs! Did anyone get out alive? “. . . trail with first 19-hour flight.” Phew! That’s okay, then.

Plain daftness

Men also get periods – according to the dopey diversifyers. No, they don’t. Male creatures don’t have the necessary plumbing. That’s a fact of nature, not a matter of opinion.

Not a rematch

It’s totally daft to call yesterday’s match between the Packers and the Raiders a replay of Super Bowl 2. With 50-odd years between them, there is absolutely no connection. The rules are not even the same.
    Still, we got to see the Ravens give the Seasquawks a good thrashing in Seattle after the Packers clobbered the Raiders @ Lambeau.

Less Vroooom!

It will be interesting to see if vegetarianist Louie Samilton offers further evidence of his planet-saving desire by turning up on the starting grid of the next Grand Prix on a push-bike.

Vroom!

Moto3 was back to normal in the dry in Japan – bodies flying everywhere on lap 1. Same with the usually sedate Moto2! But one of the comms did mention he was expecting a Moto3-style race. Then back to civilized racing in MotoGP and Marc Marquez showing everyone who’s boss.

Time saved!

Thanks to Brexit and the celeb cult, I find myself skipping more and more pages of my newspapers because I don’t want to read rehashes of familiar Brexit stuff or be informed about people who are completely irrelevant to me.

No sale!

“TROUBLE HEARING?” yelled the TV advert.
“No, mate,” I muttered as I frantically turned the volume down.

Somewhat pointless

I watched the Daft & the Furious 8 on ITV 2 last night and there was a bad guy helicopter crash with the pilot going “Mayday, mayday!” But what sort of aid can anyone give to a chopper that’s a second and a half from making a hole in the ground?

If only THEY would go extinct

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if one of the Xtinctionists ended up kissing the third rail while running riot in the Tube. Purely by accident, of course! It would certainly cheer up the rest of us.

How many cheers?

Is it a good thing that the Transport Secretary is thinking of re-nationalizing the failed Northern Rail franchise? Given that past governments have a much less than sparkling record when it comes to running railways, especially when Labour is in office, the nation has its doubts.

KFO

When you think about it, multiculturalism is no different from eco-controlfreakism and other repellent tendencies. Britain has a perfectly adequate culture; one which has evolved to fit the temperament of the people living here. Other cultures exist in other parts of the world for the same reason. Being told that we must embrace them on a whim of cultural control-freaks is not a good enough reason to do it. Some of us have other things to do with our time.

Another argument for getting out of the EU!

I was amazed to read that the king of Belgium’s aunt was arrested at an Xtinction Rebellion shambles in London. Looks like the riot police in Brussels aren’t a soft touch, like the Met.

Go home, you old sprout!

What’s the aunt of the King of Belgium doing getting herself arrested at an Xtinction hoo-haa in London? Doesn’t she have a country of her own where she can make a nuisance of herself?

Wonderful timing!

A pizza ad urging viewers to order for half time . . . shown half-way through the third quarter of the London NFL match.

A reasonable excuse

Wudda stood up for the anthems @ Spurs FC before the NFL match yesterday but I had a cat parked on my lap at the time. That fair catch/free kick combo to close the first half has to put this Bucs vs the Panthers clash on the pub quiz map!

Daft as a shopful of brushes

You know the world has gone mad when you read that teenage obsessive Greenhouse Greta, the Swedish kid with end of the world fantasies, is thought to have been in line for a Nobel Peace prize!

A big TV question

How much job security did the actor who played the boss in Charlie’s Angels have if no one ever saw his face?

Ambiguous headline

“Lawyer fined £38K for groping naked junior . . . but can still practise.” To do what? Perfect his groping technique?

No escaping from quibbles

“Difficulty in reading the small print affects 75% of over-45s in the UK”, Boots the Chemist tells us in a newspaper ad. And just to prove it, Boots shoves in some small print to take the gloss off its virtuous offer of free eye tests.

Deserts

Nice to see Agent Sandoval come to a painful sticky end in the final episode of Earth: Final Conflict. It’s something I’ve been looking forward to ever since the Horror Channel went above and beyond the couple of series shown donkey’s years ago on one of the 4 or 5 original TV channels.

Not even a near miss

The Horror Channel zooming in on 4x3 programmes to create a screen-filling, faux 16x9 picture might look like a good idea on paper but it doesn’t work in practice. But a backward step to something that’s better is not something the TV industry can cope with.

Where’s the ALF when you need them?

It took me a while to track down the reference – mainly because Brief Candle by Robert Arion was published back in 1996 – but he created an organization called the Air Liberation Front, whose motto was “Liberating trapped air, wherever it may be found”. Just the people to let down the tyres of all the vehicles which brought ecoyobs to London to disrupt life there!

Really, really impressive

I watched an episode of Charlie’s Angels the other night and I was struck by the crisp quality of the pictures. Whoever developed the process for digitizing these ancient programmes deserves a Nobel Prize for scientific genius.

Damned either way

The ecobrats who are larking about in London claim to be worried that they won’t live long enough to have children. But if they get their way and ban all transport and industry, the world won’t be able to support the present population. Which means that the ecobrats will starve to death and they still won’t have any kids.

What DID he mean?

I’ve just finished reading The Remorseless Day and I still don’t believe that Inspector Morse was a dedicated The Archers fan. It has to be some sort of euphemism. But what on Earth did Colin Dexter have in mind? Beats me.

Tricky customers

Why are tower PCs preferable to desktops? My expert had to work out how to get the case off an old desktop to change the motherboard battery. Which turned out to be hidden in the most inaccessible corner available, under the drive cage. Just whipping the side off a tower is so much easier and more obvious.

A matter of perception

Maybe vehicles just sound louder when it’s wet but when I ventured out into the rain, more cars than usual seemed to be blasting through the nearby village at reckless speed.

Another off-putting ad

There’s a TV advert for blinds which come with a 3-year guarantee, which doesn’t seem all that much. ‘Do they start dropping to pieces in their 4th year?’ is the sort of question someone like me asks. It certainly explains why the blinds aren’t guaranteed for 5 or even 10 years.

This ain’t inflation

I’ve just been looking at what Vistaprint charge for calendars – 20 quid for the size I’m interested in!!! Or 10 quid with their 50% discount. Which is still a hell of a lot more than the £37 I paid for 5 calendars at the end of 2016.

New Labour’s legacy lives on

It has taken three years for the Henriques Report on the conduct of the police officers who ‘investigated’ the fantasies of Carl Beech to reach the newspapers. No surprise that all of them are the sort of person who flourished under the cosmetic New Labour flag. Tony bloody Blair, and his cronies, still have a hell of a lot to answer for.

Me vs the cat – I never expect to win

What’s worse than the cat walking across the keyboard of your laptop and putting garbage into your document? Me making a barrier with my fingers to keep the cat off the keyboard and finding myself looking at a blue screen with the words “Shutting down” on it when the cat is out of the way because she managed to step on the ‘off’ button.

Advanced lifeforms?

We’ve just had a delivery of what the packaging tells us are “Lancashire Superior White Potatoes”. I’m now waiting to find out if they sneer if the person peeling them doesn’t do a proper job of it.

Remorseless inflation

In his last outing in 1999, Inspector Morse was paying £1 for a pint of beer. If he were to be brought back to life now, the shock of what pubs are charging for a pint now would do him in again in very short order!

Is BT Sport running a hate campaign?

One of my mates is wondering what BT Sport has against the Ottawa Redblacks. There were four sets of CFL highlights shown last week but the Montreal Alouettes' match was shown twice and they ignored the Ottawa Redblacks vs the BC Lions. Again, this week: four CFL highlights episodes, the Alouettes’ match shown twice and the Redblacks vs the Eskimos was ignored. If you want to annoy your customers with a display of perversity, BT Sport is doing a grand job.

Small whinge, no cause for alarm

No wonder the world is going down the tubes if people get bent out of shape because they can’t use their spy gadget to wake up to Radio 4 after the Beeb fell out with Amazon. Anyone who is incapable of using an alarm clock and switching on a radio is not much of an advert for the human race.

Great conspiracy theory!

Seb Vettel getting uppity in the Russian Grand Prix. He’s beefing about a pit stop, he’s allowed to make on eventually and his car croaks almost as soon as he gets back on the track. Did  Ferrari deliberately sabotage the mouthy sod’s car to show him who‘s boss? We shall never know for sure.

Truth in Advertising

At Lloyds Bank, our No. 1 priority is your money – grabbing it and giving you a miserable rate of interest on anything you manage to save. Shame they don’t tell you that second bit in their TV adverts.

Call that progress?

I’ve just started reading The Remorseful Day by Colin Dexter – the last of his Inspector Morse epics. There were only 5 TV channels when it was published 20 years ago. And Sky. Now, it feels like there are two million and five – most of them showing programmes made back in the 20th century!

Note to J. Corbyn

Further to your party conference BS, if someone chooses to have a large family, they should be obliged to support the whole of the family rather than expecting others to reduce their own expectations in order to give their cash to the reckless breeder. It’s only fair. But since when did fair have anything to do with Labour party politics?

Another musing

I hadn’t spotted this myself by I’m now wondering about it after a friend who uses the internet a lot more than me pointed it out: why doesn’t the all-singing, all-dancing wonder-browser Firefox display the ‘alt’ text that website creators add to their graphics?

Today’s musing

How curious that the word “palindrome” doesn’t work as a word which reads the same forward and backwards.

A pinch of NFL salt needed

Conventional wisdom holds that turnovers are lethal in the NFL. But after giving the ball away four times yesterday, the 49ers ended up just six-nil down to the Steelers. So what do the conventionals know?

It’s Clothears again

“Switch to a different style of breakdance service,” the voice from the TV advert seemed to be telling me. Which left me wondering why the advertiser would think I had a breakdance service and what was likely to be so wonderfully superior about the one on offer.

Bye, bye, EU

The Mansion has now been consciously uncoupled from the EU. We’re not buying anything from EU countries until their governments stop treating us like vampires who need to be staked through the heart. My supply people are confident that we can get the same quality @ the same price either from UK-based firms or from elsewhere in the world.

It’s all about the way you tell ’em

Two thousand grand – does that sound more or less impressive than two million pounds? The unfamiliarity of the amount certainly gives it a greater impact because it makes the recipient of the wisdom think a bit.

Bang goes their credibility

Good stuff, the fake news, if even the Supreme Court in England will swallow an illegitimate scenario and play politics with the law.

Hardly life and death

The Daily Mail has developed an unhealthy fixation on what it calls “Boris’s blonde”. Could it be that he is ignoring their questions because the Prime Minister has better things to do with his time than get involved in a Silly Season space-filler? One certainly would hope so.

Things I didn’t know No. 3,185

There’s a breed of cat called the Werewolf Cat! Apparently, it is a relatively recent mutation, which excuses my ignorance somewhat.

Today’s thought

Gluten Morgen! – greeting which excludes intolerant people!

Brilliant biking

An unusually crash-free Moto3 race at Aragon; apart from the bloke whose bike bounced off the track leaving him with other riders zooming and just missing him on both sides. Scary! Nice of them to have the MotoGP next to avoid clashing with the F1 Grand Prix, wherever that is. Given the choice, I’d have watched MotoGP every time.

Labour ye not to to save The Planet

Everyone skiving off work for half an hour yesterday, the trade union bosses assured their members, would change the climate. It certainly hasn’t changed the climate of opinion that trade union bosses are useless nutters.

The cat diet

After the first course of your evening meal, the cat parks herself on your lap, which means that you can’t head in to the kitchen for a second course and you don’t get fat.

Own goal

In a newspaper advert, the Nationwide building society was bemoaning the fact that 11.5 million adults have no more than £100 saved for the proverbial rainy day. Maybe the piss-poor interest rates paid to savers by the Nationwide and its rivals is at the back of that.

Meaningful message

I spotted a printed paper sign added to the advertising board outside a barber’s shop yesterday. It announced: “Walk-In Appointments Available”. Which is a bit more inventive than: “Haircuts While You Wait”.

Easy escape

The bad guy glowers at a minion and tells him: “If you want to get out of her alive, you have to go through me.”
    Don’t you just wish that as the BG is taking off his jacket and tie to get ready for some lethal kung foolery that the minion would whip out a gun and fill his sorry hide full of lead?

Time to bin his award

Former prime monster John Major has turned into a tedious old attention-seeker. It’s definitely time to start an online petition to have his K removed as painfully as possible.

Just incompetent

Some bloke in a wig making a guess at what was on the Prime Minister’s mind is not evidence and it should be treated with the contempt which it deserves.

Time shift

Not much on TV so I decided to watch a recorded film. All the ads about Christmas had me baffled for a while. Until I realized that there might be a clue in the age of the recording.

More Madhouse

How on earth did university admissions become based on over-optimistic predictions of exam results? It has to be New Labour’s idea of sending 50% of school leavers to university – whether or not it would do them any good – at the back of it. Not, in 80% of the cases.
    I notice Dave the Former Leader is having a good whinge to plug his memoirs. And yet he did nothing about sorting out university admissions when the idea came up in 2012. So you’re not all that brilliant, are you, Dave?

Proverb for today

You can park a cat on your lap in front of the TV, but don’t expect her to watch the American football.

Technology that’s just plain annoying

One of the most annoying things about TV remote controls is the buttons which you never use but which can be pressed by accident if it’s lying on the settee next to you, leaving you looking at an adjustment screen you’ve never seen before with no clear line of escape other than putting the set on and then off standby, or switching the power off then on again.

Sunny San Marino

Suddenly, it’s pouring down with rain. Where has all the sun gone? Off to Italy for the MotoGP, where they must be glad of it. Mayhem in Moto3! Ten riders gone in the first ten minutes! But our British guy managed a magnificent second place. And an equally magnificent win for Marc Marquez after his string of second places.

Weasel Numbers

In the good old daze, newspapers would tell us how many millions of copies they’ve sold when they claimed to be top of the heap. Now, it’s all percentages of the market, which means they could be selling thousands of paper versions now rather than the millions of the glory days.

Drop Dead, Dave

With a book to plug, Dave the former Leader throws a Brexit wobbly. Probably hoping that we’ve forgotten that he’s the one who made a bog of things in the first place. But we haven’t, Dave.

Another of life’s mysteries

It still bugs me, that full stop in the title of “Earth: Final Conflict.”, even after four full series and into a fifth. Why is it there? It’s not as if the series title is a sentence.

Hurry on Xtinction!

Teenagers who spend more than 3 hours per day on antisocial media will go nuts, the experts reckon. Maybe it’s just as well they’re the last ever generation! We have quite enough nuts around as it is, especially in the London area.

Originality, schmoriginality

They do keep coming back. The Avatus in series 5 of Earth: Final Conflict [20:00, Horror Channel] are just vampires ripped off, and they were reincarnated as the Wraith for Stargate Atlantis.

There has to be a catch . . .

There’s this ad on TV urging people to avoid 31 days of hangovers by Going Sober in October. I’ve just realized that the amount I normally drink lets me stay sober all the time and hangover-free. Which means that I do what this bunch of control freaks want in every month of the year. How very distressing!

Get more real

The NFL and the CFL have collected a deal of derision with their ‘unnecessary roughness’ penalties, which sound prissy and wimpish. I would like to suggest just plain ‘roughhousing’ as a much more manly and robust alternative.

Noses out!

An incompetent Scottish court plays politics over the prorogation of Parliament to stuff more cash into the pockets of lawyers. That’s what it looks like from here.

Drowned!

What’s the difference between smoked bacon from the butcher and what the supermarkets sell? The half-pint of water that gushes out of the supermarket pack gives you the best clue.

Unexplainable uselessness

I’m still wondering why Sky Sports can’t synchonize sound and picture when they do American football shows featuring talking heads, who are never saying what we’re hearing out of our TV speakers. It’s such a basic requirement, which was solved by the moving picture industry over a century ago. Which makes it rather baffling that it’s beyond present-day Sky’s capabilities.

Bad memory? More like terrible!

How much confidence can you have in a kicker who has to wear odd shoes so that he knows which foot to use to boot the ball? Like that bloke doing it for the Cleveland Browns.

Diversity denied

We keep hearing about the messes created by Third World countries, which are where our overseas aid is poured in to the pockets of spivs and despots. But why does the Second World never get a mention any more. Blatant discrimination.

Unwarranted expectations

I still can’t help thinking that a programme with ‘Strictly’ in its title should involve masked ladies in skimpy leather or rubber outfits going round whipping people. Which is probably why I never watch it; to avoid the disappointment of being disappointed by a lack of whippers-in.

Silly question

“If you can’t pay for your funeral . . . who will?” is says on the leaflet which fell out of my Sunday paper. But if you’re dead, you’re not going to be that bothered so why ask?

There was a highly unusual case of Midsomer Murders – The Silent Land – on last night. Only one murder for DCI Tom Barnaby to solve instead of the usual shower by some hissy git; until about 10 minutes to go. And both executions were clear cases of justifiable homicide.

Yeah, right!

Does anyone believe that former actor S. O’Connery was lucky not to be killed by Storm Dorian whilst he was hunkering in his storm-proof bunker on a Bahama island? There’s bollocks and there are stories like this.

So what?

We’re being told that if Theresa May had expelled Boris Johnson and the ERG from the Tory party for not doing what she wanted, they’d be out on their ears. Just what we need – another statement of the bleedin’ obvious about something that didn’t happen.

More wibble

Does anyone care that some people spend 500 days of their life travelling to and from work, as some stooge has calculated? And lots of others don’t, I suppose. Thought not.

Not credible

Is anyone going to buy a 10-foot eel instead of a plesiosaur as the Loch Ness monster, which is what the experts have come up with? Pur-lease!

Yes, it was trite

Took me long enough but I’ve just realized that the American astronauts who went to the Moon ‘in peace’ didn’t have much choice in the matter if the only person available to fight was the other bloke.

Not quite rock bottom

21 Tory MPs betray their constituents, their party and their country. Can they sink any lower? Well, they do have the option of joining Momentum . . .

Self-damaging wibble

Is anyone likely to be impressed by sacked minister the Gaukster calling the PM ‘confrontational’? It just makes Gauke look pathetic.

Doomed and deserving it

Maybe someone should mention to the Xtinction brats that global warming is happening because God has looked down on the human race and decided that the experiment has failed. She’s now wiping the slate clean for another go, which means that the brats have no chance, no matter how much traffic they stop.

Laugh this one off

The Bremoaners @ Westminster have announced their intention of using every dirty trick in the book to prevent PM Boris from getting us out of the EU on October 31st. It will be interesting to see what they come up with in response to a threat by our PM to veto the EU budget to make sure that the sods don’t agree to another Brexit extension.

Today’s dilemma

In these oppressive times, can we still talk about black tea without being accused of racialism by the outrage confectors? Or even a basic white sauce when we get the urge to cook a meal?

No great disaster

The hot summer has cut French wine production by one-eighth. Good job lots of other countries produce more than enough high quality alternatives to bridge any gaps.

Melting Plot

What is happening to the anti-democratic Bremoaners’ conspiracy options.

A Counterblast to the Insolence of Office

“As a (fill the relevant category, e.g. committed Socialist), I cannot relate to these comments.”
    To which the answer is:
“Your inability to relate to them is a defect in you rather than anything to do with the validity of the comments.”

What a weird world we live in

I ventured out the other morning after the weather had turned what I thought was nasty. I was wearing an anorak and expecting rain. I was treated to the sight of a well-nourished bloke in sorts and a vest and bright red fingernails. Obviously, no one had told him that the heat wave is over.

Channelling James Thurber . . .

. . . who wrote: “You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.” To which may be added: “especially on the internet.”

Thought for the day

Why was there a Hell for the Devil to be expelled to when God dumped him out of Heaven? It has to be proof that God knew he was a tyrant and knew that he’d have to make an example of someone some day.

Another Proverb for our times

The world is so full of daft ideas that one more won’t make a scrap of difference.

Proverb for our times

Accusations are cheap, especially when made in pursuit of megabucks.

Not even slave labour, Mr. Sainsbury

One thousand Nectar points can be redeemed for £5 of goods at Sainsbury’s. Which means that if they offer me 100 Nectar points for doing a 10-minute online survey, they’re offering me the princely sum of 50p and an hourly rate of three quid. What’s the minimum wage? Not even close to that.

Natural suspicion

It says trustatrader on the screen and there’s a picture of some bloke who looks like an artisan, but it’s on TV and it’s about the internet. So you assume that the bloke is an actor who knows nothing about the trade he’s pretending to do. Credibility blown.

No sale

There’s this bloke doing an advert on TV. The sound is turned down but he keep touching his nose – which means he’s lying, right? Good to know these things.

Scrape, scrape

I can’t help thinking that if the florets joke was the best that the Edinburgh Fringe could produce, then the overall standard had to be pretty miserable. Maybe as miserable as the offence junkies who complained about the joke.

British MotoGP

The upgrades to the track at Silverstone made the Moto3 race unusually civilized, with everyone staying on the track. Apart from the pair who went out with 15/17 laps to go. And Fenati
    Drama right away in the MotoGP race: Quateraro taking out Dovizioso, who’s 2nd in the championship, at turn 1. Would Rins be capable of beating Marc Marquez? He had the tyres to take the win by half a front wheel at the line! Great stuff.
    Disaster for Alex Marquez @ turn 16 in the Moto2 race: the pole-sitter fell off. But as Luthi, who’s next in the championship, could manage only 8th, no great damage done to Alex’s lead.

TV Heaven

Why is Easy Rider on TV film channels such a lot all of a sudden. To remind us that Peter Fonda has gone to the great drug store in the sky. I wonder if anyone from Steppenwolf is still alive to collect royalty payments from their music?
    Afterthought: The film will probably slip back into obscurity shortly as it is pretty boring and the ending is totally daft.

Ratings for all

What the social meeja need is a ratings system for the seriousness of the people who sound off about the crimes of others. That’s people like the MP who rejoices in the nickname of Captain Underpants. All of the comments by people of his ilk should be tagged with a reminder of their past glories. And the ratings should be compiled by independent, sensible people like my good self. At an appropriately generous remuneration, of course.

Looking for something to take the biscuit?

I’ve just been reading about Bielefeld, a town in Germany who is offering a million euros to anyone who can prove that the place doesn’t exist! Why? Because some Yank started a conspiracy theory to that effect in 1994, and the town is now a laughing stock. Which has prompted the city fathers to make their put up or shut up offer of the million euros.
    What a weird world we live in.

What would we do without Brexit?

Apparently, if the slightest thing goes wrong, Brexit now gets the blame. Like Jammy Oliver’s restaurant chain collapsing. It was really nice of alternate celeb chef M.P. White to give him a verbal boot up the backside and explain where the buck stops.

The weird ideas some writers have

I’m currently reading The Janus Stone by Elly Griffiths, who does novels about a forensic anthrapologist, Ruth Galloway, and tries to rewrite history at times. She talks about a woman of 75 whose hands are skeletal, misshapen mummy’s fists. Which I find rather strange. I know several people of that age and none of them looks mummified.

No kidding!

It seems that the number of arbitrary gender identities has reached 19 and they include ‘bigender’. One assumes that applies to someone with a backside as big as all outdoors. But quite how that defines gender escapes me.

She probably wishes I hadn’t bothered

I keep seeing the name Sarah Wollaston chucked about as if she’s a person of consequence – so I looked her up. Turns out she’s an MP who used to insist that anyone who swaps party should put themself up for re-election. Until she did it herself. Turned her coat. Twice.
    She went from Tory to Change UK to Liberal. Of course, not a hint of a re-endorsement from her constituents. Which means that she’s just another bloody Westminster hypocrite.

Picking too many nits

If the boss of Man. Utd. Really is bothered that his team isn’t top of the football league division one after only two matches, he is in serious need of getting a life. Nobody remembers or cares who was top of the table two weeks in to last season, and the same will apply next season.

Just what we need

The TV companies are lobbying for more and longer advert breaks to let them compete with the internet, which is hoovering up their traditional sources of revenue. Oh, joy!

Deliberately crossed wires

WTF does plastic pollution have to do with climate change? It’s just more mutual back-scratching by the gangs of people trying to pick our pockets.

New Rule

Everyone who works for a regulatory body, e.g. the Advertising Standards Authority, should be required to display an identifying badge at all time so that the taxpayers who pay their wages can quote their organization’s most ridiculous rulings at these stooges and laugh at them.

When the truth stops, STOP

In a properly regulated society, the use of weasel words would be punished by an eye-watering fine. The severest penalty would be reserved for TV adverts in which the words ‘gamble’ and ‘responsibly’ are uttered with a Cockney accent.

Don’t buy from them myself

The Greggs bakery has cut the size of its custard slices in half with a claim that it wants its customers to eat less sugar. The claim might have some merit if they had also halved the price; which remains the same at £1 a pop. Clearly, Greggs are hoping that sugar junkies will buy two of the slices and double their profits. This line of thinking is so corrupt that it belongs in politics.

Still thinking about it?

It’s quite fun watching the Tory traitors claiming there’s no way they’d vote for Corbyn as PM. If it were a secret ballot, though . . .

You have to think it

A police officer is done to death whilst investigating a burglary and 10 males, including a teenage kid, end up in custody. It’s impossible not to think the ‘T’ word. Whether or not any of them were involved, that’s the reputation they have made for themselves.

Who the hell cares?

Do we really need to know that someone who has done a survey found that the average Brit spends 11% of his/her time waiting for things to happen, like kettles boiling? In one ear, out the other.

Very deserving

“Let’s talk about leaky bladders.” “Philip Skofield here, inviting you to sell your car for less than it’s worth.”
    The person who thought of a remote-control mute button for the TV sound should get a gold medal and a Nobel Prize at the very least.

Grapes come no sourer

There does seem to be bucketfuls of jealousy sloshing around as politicians, members of the Church and other ‘worthies’ line up to sound off about the Boy Wayne’s megamillion shirt deal with an online bookie. Like anyone would pay the worthies anything at all for such a deal.

It’s all politics

The troubled teenager Greenhouse Greta doesn’t think it’s her job to come up with solutions to her imaginary problems – that’s a job for adults. Nice to know she’s giving employment to a spin doctor to come up with cute nonsense for her.

Doomed advert

How much credibility can ‘Icelandic-style yoghurt’ have? Especially if being free of all real food ingredients is offered as a selling point.

A touch premature

How nice of the Daily Mail to give Boris’ wife a plug for her forthcoming book. Shame everyone will have forgotten the plug by the time the book is published next year.

Corrupted!

Doing a codeword puzzle, it took me far too long ro realize that the missing letter in cen_re had to be ‘t’, especially as it was vertical rather than horizontal. I’m much too used to seeing the word written as ‘center’ in HTML code.

Cheaply skating?

I’ve just read a brilliant offer which ended “and a glass of Proseco for two”. Which left me wondering if whoever was delivering the offer would be cheeky enough to supply one glass of wine to the two people and assure them that they’re getting exactly what was on offer.

Bikers on form (and on time)

A wet track with a ribbon-like dry line, which vanished in place, made the Austrian Moto3 race relatively sedate and uncharacteristically unchaotic. Until the spot of craziness at the end of the penultimate lap. Moto2 made up the mayhem quota! And that was a great duel between Marquez and Dovizioso in the MotoGP race.

We hate BT Sport and we hate BT Sport

Those bastards are having an effin’ laugh. Switch on at 4 p.m. for the Friday Night CFL edits, sit and read an Inspector Morse novel until a quarter to five before we get the first of them. Bastards.

False flag

If British Airways is Spanish-owned, it is no longer the nation’s flag-carrier. It’s just a foreign firm with ‘British’ in its name to fool the unwary. Thus, there is no need to worry about BA’s IT collapses being a stain on Britain’s reputation. It’s all down to Spanish mismanagement.

Non-news wins

Friday’s late afternoon/early evening power black-out of most of England and Wales. How did that miss the front page?

Useless BT Sport

If the CFL match edit doesn’t fill the time slot, why won’t BT Sport put the fillers on AFTER the match instead of BEFORE the match? And start the match, which is what the customers tuned in for, on time? Probably because some clueless corporate zombie thinks it’s a good idea.

Everybody relax

It’s reassuring that “Zara’s secret deal with tycoon” is front-page news. Clearly, nothing dramatic is happening if peripheral royals making a few bob is the only shock-horror going.
    And if “Are we plunging into a recession?” is only page 2 news, then we don’t have to take the idea seriously.

The message is a mess

One minute, the UN is telling us that producing enough food to feed the planet’s population will be a huge problem. The next, we’re being told that one-third of all the food produced is wasted and dumped. To any sensible person, the problem (if there is one) is one of distribution rather than production.

Which proves what?

How many of the list of the 50 allegedly most-read books have I read? Nine. Or it might be 10; I’m not sure if I’ve actually read Lord of the Rings but I do have a copy of it somewhere. None of the nine is about Harley Potter. How many others not on the list have I read? Thousands.

Campaign convenience

Are we really expected to believe that one in eight deaths is caused by dementia? What is more likely is that one in eight people who die have dementia to one extent or another but the primary cause of death is old age and one of the usual bodily failures.

Unreasonable expectation

Why would anyone be shocked and disgusted that criminals should ‘stoop so low as to grow cannabis in a disused church’? The CoE branch was closed through lack of demand. And the cannabis growers are criminals – people who are noted for stooping as low as they need in pursuit of a dishonest bob.

The first resort of the scoundrel

A witness reckons that the homicidal brat who tried to murder a 6-year-old French boy at Tate Modern tried to play the ‘society is to blame’ card. And no one is surprised.

Good idea or gesture?

I read in the paper that the police at Whaley Bridge are using drones to look for housebreakers on the prowl in the area threatened by the weakened dam. But how much use will they be at night, the traditional time for burglars to go on the prowl?

Back to where we should be

Order was restored in the Hungarian Grand Prix. The pretender Max Verstappen looked like he had a good chance of winning but superior strategy by Mercedes gave our local hero (even if he lives in Monaco) a faster car at the end. Louis on the top step of the podium where a British driver belongs.

Just bloody useless

What do you get when you try to watch your recording of the Saturday Night CFL match? One of the Thursday night matches because those stoopid twats at BT Sport put the wrong programme on the air.

Vrooom!

Unusual bike failures, crashes and riders sliding in to the kitty litter all over the place. Welcome back MotoGP after the summer break. There was some localized rain to wet just part of the track before the main race, but everything went off okay after a delay to let the track dry and Marc Marquez marched to his 50th MotoGP victory.

Devil in the detail

We’re hearing a lot about vehicles powered by hydrogen made at wind farms. But just how efficient will they be, given how extra highly explosive hydrogen is and the amount of cladding needed to make the hydrogen fuel store crash-proof.

Awfulness exposed

There’s nothing like a spot of sunny weather for finding out who has tattoos and how bad they are.

Strange Company

One assumes that advertisers do some research befor they pay to put adverts inside TV programmes. Which tells me that when I watch an episode of The Mentalist on the Fox channel, I do so in the distant company of lots of ladies with leaky bladders.

Bummer!

The ads came on, I picked up the remote control and banged the fast-forward button. Nothing happened. Apparently, you can’t skip the ads in a life programme as you can with a recording. Did it again at the end of the third quarter of a Thursday Night CFL match highlights!

Local invention

There’s a St. William Close near us and the sign has the local municipal arms at either end. Going past it yesterday, I noticed that someone had attached a white sleeve to the front end of the sign and painted the letters J and U on the sleeve, turning the road in to Just William Close. I’m now waiting to see if anyone kicks up a fuss about it or a sense of humour prevails.

Brilliant idea

Please give a medal to the bloke who came up with the idea of using empty bank premises to house some of Boris's 20,000 new coppers. We have three of them near us (former banks, that is) and sticking the prisoners in a bank vault would be a great idea.

You’re gone

L.A. Spiders “has all the depth of a shallow puddle”, a reviewer reckons. I’m glad someone else thinks that. I feel I can abandon them with a clear conscience. Especially as the alternative is a Melissa McCarthy film tonight.

Panicked out

Oh, dear! We’re going into emergency fatigue. Every bloody thing is an emergency these days and we might as well just give up and stop bothering.

Nothing new

As Mr. Littlejohn in today’s Daily Mail has reminded us, frying eggs on the pavement during a heatwave is something that has been going on for decades and decades and began long before global warming was invented.

The answer is obvious

Poor students are 18 months behind their wealthier peers? Maybe if they tried harder and became good students, they would catch up a bit.

More rain! More rain!

There’s nothing like a wet track for shaking up otherwise dull Formula 1, and that’s what we got for the German Grand Prix. There was a trackside sign boasting “125 years of Mercedes”. It was rammed by Leclerc (Ferrari) first. Then Hamilton went across the skidpan and bashed his front wing into it. The Incredible Hulkenberg also rammed it.
    Seb Vettel started last, his Ferrari having croaked at the start of qualifying, and finished 2nd. Hamilton went from last to first last year. He went from first to ninth this year. Verstappen started second, bogged up, but recovered to win. Something well worth watching for a change.

Could be worse

An actress reckons she was reduced to tears on finding that her 5x grandmother was sold as a slave in Nigeria. Imagine how much more upset she would have felt if her 5x granny had turned out to be one of the Nigerians who were selling their compatriots into slavery!

Well off target

A woman who (surprise) is plugging a book about Lady Macbeth reckons that W. Shakespeare didn’t do her any favours. But why would he? He was creating a play; popular entertainment, not history. And anyone with more than two brain cells to rub together knows that.

Well, really!

Politicians don’t half talk bollocks. Like Nicola S. (in Lerwick) saying that Shetland didn’t vote for a Tory government or Boris Johnson. Clearly, she hasn’t grasped the concepts of democracy applied to the whole country and a toe not wagging the dog.

Not a guy to mess with?

There was a photo of J. Rees-Mogg in Saturday’s paper looking unshaven and rather scruffy despite his top hat. Is the new Leader of the House trying to create a new, tough image?

One unexpected rabbit!

The surprise of a road-blocking deluge of hail in the Alps during the Tour de France was topped by the local authorities having a snow plough on hand to clear the road. Such enterprise is something one does not normally associate with the powers that be. Some rabbit, some hat!
    A snow plough versus that very impressive mud-slide though? That was definitely a race-stopper. And yet another surprise on a day of them.

Cheers, Boris!

How gratifying that the new prime minister found time away from his busy schedule to send me not one but two emails about his plans for Britain. He truly is a Man of the People and in touch with them.

Wasted effort

The newspapers are going mad with profiles with politics in the current state of flux. (Or all fluxed up?) But is it worth the time and trouble, given the general shiftiness of politicians? Look at old Corbyn as a prime example. He has been opposed to the evil empire of the EU all through his career but he is now busting a gut to keep us in it for his own personal advantage. Today’s principles are tomorrow’s bin-fodder in the world of politics.

Boris is good for body and mind!

That old fool Corbyn has had a tergiversating career. Reach for the Chambers 20th Century Dictionary (1,400 grams); not in it. Get up, cross the room to retrieve Vol. II of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2,275 grams). Ah! It means “turning one’s back on”, which is a posh way of saying U-turn. I’m informed now, and I’ve had a bit of exercise whilst achieving my information.

Bye-ee!

No one was fooled by the resignations of ministers on Mrs. May’s last day. It was the rats scuttling out of the farmyard before the new cool cat, Boris the Dude, could sink his teeth in to them!

Heroes for all time

The Avengers have been crowned as cinema’s mightiest heroes. There’s no beating John Steed and his team.

Could work

Ha, ha! Sarah Vine’s notion in today’s Daily Mail that global warming could be the key to tackling the obesity crisis is brilliant in its originality. But she can expect to be slagged off good and proper by the Warmists.

Exotic food, indeed

There was this recipe and one of the ingredients was 200 grams of plain Quark. Quark!! That’s the dodgy Ferengi who runs the bar/casino/dubious entertainment joint on Deep Space Nine, right?
    Is it okay to eat a member of a sentient alien species? Well, if he’s not human, it’s not cannibalism.

Fuel for the imagination

Reading The Closer by Michael Connelly, something on page 59 stopped me dead in my tracks. Two detectives were having a meal break and the woman had ordered pork chops. Her plate arrived with SIX of them on it!! No wonder Americans are so BIG!

Bog up

The BBC’s News Channel has made a mess of revising the screen-bottom updates. The size of the type needs to be larger, which means a return to the previous ticker-tape, rolling messages is needed to get a decent amount of info across, the messages need to be on the screen for longer and the box with the current time in the bottom right corner could be four times bigger than it is at present and that much more legible.

Come on!

Has famous singer and performer Elton John battled with drink and drugs? Which implies that drink & drugs forced themselves on him. No, it was all about Mr. John’s choosing to indulge in them and 100% self-inflicted.

The name in Spain

Barcelona, it seems, has an airport called El Prat. Which prat let that happen!

Hammond decoded

“I’ll resign rather than be Chancellor under Boris Johnson” means “I’m off in order to deprive Boris of the pleasure of sacking me”. And everyone knows it.

New proverb needed

Cheats never prosper? Try telling that to athletes who lost a medal to a drug cheat from a communist regime or post-communist Russia. And it doesn’t stop the cheats from trying it on. Witness the klepto-communists in charge of the Labour party and their plans to nationalize everything for their own fun and profit.

Life’s choices

One of my neighbours has decided to have eight wives – four better and four richer. He’s skipping four worse and four poorer, which sounds like a good idea.

Wither education?

One of the Daily Mail’s Correspondents is asking if the Sun controls the Earth’s climate. Obviously, someone whose schooling didn’t inform him that if the Sun were to stop shining, that would be it for the Earth, which would become a frozen lump of rock with no atmosphere.

Poke the lion, make him roar

Is President Trump “stoking the most despicable and disturbing currents in our society”, as his rival Bernie Sanders would have us believe? In fact, the stoking is being done by the victim-status- and attention-seeking Democrat wimmin in the House, who have provoked this whole row to further their own personal agenda.
    “Put things right where you or your family came from, then come back here and tell us how you did it” is what Trump actually said to them. But that’s much too reasonable for the harpies to accept.

Anticipating Brexit

The compilers of the Daily Mail’s Quick Crossword keep referring to a banana as a ‘long, curved fruit’. They’ve obviously never read the EU regulations requiring bananas to be straight as the proverbial arrow for no obvious reason.

What a weird world we live in

A woman, who had herself rebuilt as a man and had a baby along the way; with the aid of an anonymous donor, of course; is now claiming to be the father of the child! ‘Those whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad’ has never been more true than today.

Stretched to breaking point

What do you have to do to be described as a ‘Bond actor’? Having an uncredited role in one of the franchise’s films seems to be enough. Which is a bit like describing someone in the crowd at a Wembley Cup Final as a ‘Cup Final participant’!

Morals on hold

A lawyer, I was told, is someone who’d claim that a person who murders both parents is deserving of the court’s sympathy because the client is now . . . an orphan!

Totally dumbed down
    16th July 2019

I’ve no idea how old the Daily Mail Correspondent who asked the question is, but has she never heard of a dictionary? Probably not, if she went to school after the Blob became rampant.
    The question was: “Why do the names of so many shapes; decagon, octagon, etc.; end in ‘gon’?” The dictionary sez . . . ‘gon’ is Greek for angle and the bit before it is the number of angles (and also sides) the shape has.
    A couple of minutes tops to find that out. Which raises another question: why did the Mail’s Answers bloke think it worthwhile to use such a limp question?

Mixed Messages

There are ads which tell us that we should pay for fancy supplements containing zinc because it is found in Nature. There are also ads telling us that lithium batteries are 100% better than zinc ones. So why aren’t the spivs flogging supplements offering lithium instead of zinc?

A fair question

A picture of the San Fermin bull-running festival in Pamplona includes a shot of the front of a shop in Consistorial Square. The name above the shop window is JAMONES Y EMBUTIDOS. Which had me asking if that’s Spanish for Jam Butties?

A wartime face?

Confronted with a plug for the series Goodnight, Sweetheart on the Forces TV channel among ads during an episode of Starsky & Hutch, I was struck by how much Nicholas Lyndhurst resembles Adolf Hitler. I wonder if he’s ever been offered that role in a film?

Not one bean, never mind a hill of them

Will the attempt to pile the blame for the demise of the British ambassador to the US onto Boris Johnson’s shoulders succeed? If the guy was already dead in the water, nothing Boris said would have made a blind bit of difference. Not that logic and sanity has anything to do with politics.

Routine puff job

Six hundred millimetres sounds a hell of a lot more than two feet when weather forecasters are going on about rain, which rather devalues their credibility through exaggeration.

Amazing good sense

It’s rather surprising that the police are accepting the argument (sort of, reluctantly) that it’s okay for newspapers to publish leaked material but a criminal offence on the part of the leaker. And as long as the politicians jump up and down on senior coppers, this pragmatic state of affairs might just continue.

Observational philosophy

We are told that hot air rises and cold air sinks, which means that when the fridge door is opened, the cold air falls out.
    If the cat is sitting in front of the fridge, she takes no notice of the door opening and the shower of cold air.
    Conclusion for a classical philosopher: cats don’t feel the cold.

Not me, mate

“I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my god than dwell in the tents of the ungodly” is the quotation at the front of the 4th Inspector Morse book.
    Anyone who subscribes to this sentiment is sadly lacking in enterprise and ambition.

Don’t you just wish . . .

When someone yells: “Someone call 911!”, that someone else would shout: “Why don’t you do it yourself, you idle sod?”

Soup mix of the day

A tin of Aldi carrot & coriander mixed with a tin of Heinz Mulligatawny works rather well.

Cue the Spiders

The new cop show which sounds like LA Spiders (but is actually LA’s Finest) in the announcements started last night. It features two wiseguy girl cops, who reckon they are LA’s Finest. They keep slagging each other off when not knocking seven bells out of urban punks. There’s the obligatory scumbag supervillain. One cop was damaged by him and the other is in cahoots with him.

Updated proverb

A watched kettle never boils and a watched Windows computer never bloody well shuts down.

There’s still a lot of poverty about

How else can one explain the sight of poor young ladies wandering around in jeans which are almost bisected at the knee or thigh? They must get v. chilly in winter.

Storm in a teaspoon

Boris wouldn’t back him, Hunt would. Big deal. The fact is that the British ambassador to the US had become a lame duck and he was never going to be able to keep the job. The only matter in question was whether he would go before he was pushed. He chose the former in a quest for a little dignity in his downfall.

The nation awaits . . .

What can possibly knock Brexit off the front page? The great debate over how often a bra should be washed. Oh, yes – I forgot. It’s the Silly Season.

The Monday Rule

When you’re hanging the washing out, always take more pegs than you need as you will always drop at least one.
    Also applicable to other endeavours and other days of the week.

No wonder ‘left’ and ‘sinister’ gang thegither

When you steal from the rich to give to the poor (deserving and undeserving), amazing amounts of cash can be made to stick to your fingers during the redistribution process. Hence the Labour party, Communists and every other bunch of thieving lefties on the planet.

Nice to see someone making an effort

The best TV ad I’ve seen for a long time? That one for Specsavers where the fluffy white cat is trying to get to a cat flap installed in the top part of the back door. As good as Basil Fawlty thrashing the police car.

Sounds of scraping

Nothing much can be going on in Scotland if the lead story in the Sunday Post is about a cocaine-courier minor gangster, who was found shot dead in a snowdrift 18 years ago in conditions needing mountain rescue to retrieve the body and no forensic survived.

Grey, grey, grey

‘Leaden sky’ in Germany during the MotoGP motorbike race. Is that their Saharan Plume done and dusted? Brilliant sunshine here.

Ungraspable

Will advertising agencies ever realize that the most common reaction to an order to ‘search something or other’ during a commercial is: “Fur cough, I’m watching TV”?

Another of life’s mysteries

I noticed when doing a search for ‘Triad impossible objects’ that there are characters who claim that they can make impossible objects using a 3-D printer. What part of ‘impossible’ do they not get?

We know what’s doing it!

The Stromboli volcano shooting out a mile-high ash cloud. Two strong earthquakes in California – the second and stronger, appropriately enough, in Death Valley. Has to be climate change behind it, doesn’t it?

Plain theft, even if it’s legal

Never mind reforming Inheritance Tax, the Tories should be abolishing it. The cash, etc., has been taxed once already. Taxing it again cannot be justified.

Discrimination!

How can the Tories get away with selling seats at a dinner with the next PM (whoever he is) as £300,000 a time? It’s blatant discrimination against socialist skivers. Unless they’re quangocrats, of course. Who would never dream of supporting the Tories with their ill-gotten gains.

Eye off the ball

Two blokes wearing ear-goggles killed by a train whilst working on railway lines in South Wales – what was their look-out doing at the time?

There’s gratitude for you

The burgers running Charlottesville, Virginia, the home town of Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence and the founder of the University of Virginia, have voted to stop holding a public holiday on the anniversary of his birth. So that’s another virtue flag waved by the nasty bastard tendency.

RSfPH Piffle

The Royal Soc. For Public Heath thinks it’s wrong to put the onus on individuals to change their habits (to become healthy). Which sums up exactly where everything has gone wrong and the public sector nannies have created a state in which the people have all sorts of rights but no personal responsibilities.

Viva the Turquoise Revolution!

Nigel Farage reckons the Tories will be toast if they don’t deliver Brexit by Halloween? A great many of them are toast already, so seeing off the rest won’t be much of a problem.

Quick off the mark

One of my mates was wondering about going into netting after that bloke in Croydon was nearly hit by a frozen stowaway, who fell out of an airliner’s landing gear as it was about to touch down. Netting that’s strong but unobtrusive to protect sunbathers from falling objects when they’re enjoying their garden on a sunny day.

Where’s Monty Python’s Colonel when you need him?

There’s some really silly advertising around. “Cancer doesn’t care”, we’re told. Well, of course it doesn’t care. It’s a disease like measles, flu or a cold. It’s a defect like an in-growing toenail. Do any of them care? No. So what’s remarkable about cancer not caring?

Unimpressive puff

Should we be impressed by an advertiser claiming that something is ‘energy efficient’?
    When you realize that energy efficiency is a starting point rather than a bonus, the claim has no more value than an assurance that the product isn’t complete rubbish. [with the implication that it may be partially rubbish]

Misplaced confidence

There’s a naive expectation in commentators, MotoGP included, that the viewers will remember something that happened in 1993. Not without your prompt sheet, mate!

Not bovvered

A Sunday Post correspondent reckons that if the police attended every report of loud noises next door in some neighbourhoods, they’d never get back to the cop shop. Wrong! It takes a snitching on a celeb and a chance to meet someone like Boris to roust the fuzz out of their retreats these days.

Different Dutch

Unusually, it was the Moto2 bike race in Holland which had lots of crashes; 11 of them! But Basher Binder did his best in Moto3 before taking to the gravel. Marc Marquez is now mature and calculating in MotoGP, opting to take the points for 2nd and extending his championship lead.

Terrible tragedy

It has been pointed out to me that reducing the official poverty numbers by excluding smokers would damage the lifestyle of Leftists, whose agenda is to steal from the rich to redistribute wealth to the poor – and let a goodly share stick to their fingers in the process.

Misleading numbers

Having noticed the price of cigarettes whilst doing a bit of shopping, I’d like to recommend that everyone who can afford to smoke should be excluded from official poverty statistics on eligibility grounds.

Top notch

Is there a better radio show than Dead Ringers? Nope. That Jeremy Corby and ‘42' sketch in this week’s show as worth a Nobel Prize for excellence.

He could always white up

Yes, a black guy can play a guy called James Bond in a film. But he won’t be Ian Fleming’s Agent 007. All that he will be is some guy in a film playing a character with the same name as the ‘real’ fictional James Bond.

SAGA slump

I note that the Daily Mail has stopped giving the Saga share price. Does this mean that the tarnished brand is now considered worthless?

Effective advice

To all luvvies who worry about putting methane into the atmosphere when the fart and causing global warming – put a cork in it.

Suck it up, mate

Some EU boss is complaining that we are foreigner bashing over Brexit. Let him be advised that we as a nation, unlike a lot of our neighbours, are decent and honourable people, and that if any foreigners are bashed, it is only ones who deserve it.

Not guilty

Park the blame where it belongs – that little girl from South America who drowned in the Rio Grande wasn’t killed by President Trump. She was killed by her father.

N.B.G.

It’s all very well for the Commissioner of the Met to be ‘not proud’ of the lack of effectiveness of Britain’s police forces. But is she doing anything about it? Anything useful, that is.

Out, foul blot

Is it possible to get hold of an edition of Star Trek: TNG with the episodes involving that tedious twat Q expunged?

Please engage brain before opening gob

“The season finale of Brockmire is full of unexpected surprises,” a breathless continuity announcer told us in a plug. As opposed to those boring expected surprises?

Fairness for the many

Boris Johnson’s tax blueprint would benefit only the rich? So what if they’re allowed to keep more of their money? The rich are people, too. And they’re entitled to a fair deal, under which the not-so-rich pay their way instead of expecting to freeload all the time.

Even more company wibble

British Gas “Looking after your world” What bollocks!
    “Overcharging you in every direction” would be more honest.

Oh, for a declutter option

What would be really brilliant would be a remote control with a facility to disable the buttons I never use so that I don’t waste time getting back to where I wanted to be after pressing a junk button by mistake.

Hopes dashed

L.A. Spiders – wow! what’s that? The latest sci-fi blockbuster show?
    Sorry, Mr. Clothears, it’s just another cop show called LA’s Finest.

More company wibble

Seen on my travels – a lorry bearing the legend:
    Electricity Northwest
    bringing energy to your door
Just what I need. Electrified doors to see off burglars.
    And me, come to think of it.

Out of time

“Them! [the SF film about giant ants] was a fantastic film, even if it was a bit before my time,” I read in yesterday’s paper. Which is a pretty silly thing to say now, when the march of DVDs, Utube and TV on demand means that we are no long dependent on something being shown in a cinema to get a look at it.

Someone will always fall for it

I feel no urge to rush my money into a virtual bank which puts my wealth in the hands of someone who can just end their online presence on a whim and make the whole lot vanish. Especially if there is no facility for recovering the investment if you get cold feet or an unexpected demand for money, such as needing cash to repair your roof after it’s ripped off by one of the tornadoes caused by global warming.

Night noises

    “Boris’ girlfriend throws a loud wobbly in the night? Good job she’s not in the running for control of the nation’s nuclear button. Unless it was all confected by some commie rag.”
    “It was in theGuardian, Milord.”
    “Ah, the latter, then.”

Well, why not?

“What’s your IQ?”
    “146.”
“Wow! Really?”
    “Yes, really. I identify as a person with an IQ of 146.”

Number fatigue

It would be nice if we could call a halt to the plague of numbers for their own sake. Such as the information that 941 pieces of plastic were found in a highly polluted river. The number without a smattering context – such as the size of the pieces, the types of plastic, sources and so on – is meaningless and not worth the trouble of gathering.
    Who’s going to be impressed by 941 microscopic bits of plastic in a whole river?

Turn about is unfair play

Michael Gove isn’t a victim of ‘dark dealings at the crossroads’. He’s just further proof that what goes around does actually come around and bite your arse.

Absolutely typical

Whoever’s in charge of Weather Control has got it wrong again. I happened to be Up North today and I was informed that despite the absolute deluges which have drowned places like areas of Lincolnshire, Saddleworth Moor could still go up in flames as there hasn’t been enough rain to saturate it to a fire-resistant state.
    They’ll be telling us the reservoirs are half-empty next and we can spend only half the usual time in the shower. And flush the toilet half as often.

Shirley they cannot B serious

“Hartley Axed” screamed the headline. But how will we manage without his jars of excellent pineapple jam?

Not actually a joke

A bloke walks into a pub where virtue flags are flying and bottles of pop are 20% off for birds. He doesn’t get the discount until he claims he identifies as female. Then he walks into a small claims court where he claims having to lie about his sex hurt his feelings.
    The judge, believe it or not, awarded him a thousand quid!! Yes, really.

Good start

I caught up with the last of the matches in the Canadian Football League’s opening week yesterday afternoon – a replay of the last Grey Cup with the new look Ottawa RedBlacks visiting the Canadian champions of the world Stampeders in Calgary. And what a finish it had. A fine example of what the CFL is all about.

When you think about it . . .

“Can’t comedians make jokes?” a letter in yesterday’s Sunday Post asked. To which the only possible response is: “No, some alleged comedians are totally incapable of making jokes”.

Good sense not appreciated

Ho, ho, ho! How amusing it is to see all Boris Johnson’s rivals bent out of shape because he’s being sparing in his pronouncements and not talking himself into trouble.

Crash-fest in Catalunya

Moto3 in Barcelona was a real riot. Six riders out in one incident. Basher Binder was taken out by pole man Rodrigo with 2 laps to go. Another gone from the lead group on the last lap and McPhee’s bike made him look like he was on a bucking bronco. But he stayed aboard to finish 13th instead of with the leaders. 12 riders DNF!
    There was a crash on the first lap of Moto2, and the series leader managed to fall off, but the attrition rate was much more modest; only 6 DNFs. Cue Mr. Lorenzo taking out three of the leaders in the main event right away, leaving Marc Marquez with an easy win with his main rival, Dovizioso, back in the pits with Rossi and Viñales, saying rude things about Lorenzo.

Topical triviality

“What would Churchill say if someone who wants to be PM is not taking part in TV debates?” ranted some tedious twerp. To which the only possible response is: “Who cares what a cartoon dog thinks?”

The CFL gets tough

Cor blimey, Guv’nor! Those 25 yard penalties for ultraviolence really make a difference in Canadian football. The Tiger-Cats gifted the visiting Roughriders a TD from their opening drive. But they reached the goal only after Hamilton had killed their starting quarterback. And they went on to kill the second string, Mr. Fajardo, as well as Mr. Collards.
    It will be interesting to see if the Cats are still playing ‘Kill the QB’ in week 8 when they go to Saskatchewan. They’ll be lucky to get out of town alive themselves if they are.

More confections

You have to be really desperate to get bent out of shape, or triumphant, over typos in President Trump’s twits on Twitter – given that everything there is just inconsequential trivia rather than anything of consequence.

This guy is a senior twerp

A ‘senior Tory’ is reported to have said that if two-thirds of Tory MPs voted against Boris Johnson in the first round of the leadership election process, he can’t be the next party leader. Which conveniently ignores that this is often what happens in a general election – two-thirds of the nation voting against the eventual winner. But that party still forms a government.

Parallel Universe

Is Boris about to be Brexited, despite President Trump’s support? He’s the choice of the majority of Tory party members but he faces being conspired into o’blivion by his enemies. Like Brexit.

Not very British

I can’t see the current Home Secretary winning many friends by complaining that he wasn’t shoe-horned in to the state banquet with President Trump. A sense of entitlement is not exactly an endearing quality.

A timely question

The start of the Star Trek: TNG episode Force of Nature left me wondering if it’s wise to put a bloke like Mr. La Forge, who thinks cats can be trained, in charge of engineering on the starship Enterprise.
    And Mr. Data can’t be all that bright if he thinks he can teach Spot not to jump up onto consoles. Some urgent reprogramming needed?

Nasty is as nasty does

Yah, boo to the racialist ‘white saviour’ haters. Does it really matter what colour skin someone’s who’s helping out in Africa has? Only to the racialist bigots.

Weather forecaster alarmism

18 millimetres of rain expected. Crumbs! That sounds a hell of a lot. What is it in feet and inches?
    Just over half an inch.
    Not impressed.

Different is just . . . different

If people will buy ‘works of art’ created by elephants, chimps and other cute animals, it stands to reason that there will be mugs willing to buy stuff created by an art robot. Or, indeed, stuff created by a human pretending to be a robot.

They’re not called plod for nothing

Who’s right? J. Clarkson for complaining that the police closed a road for over 11 hours after a fatal shunt? Or the police for claiming they have a hard life as an excuse for adding to a long list of foot-dragging over logging the scene and reopening a stretch of road?
    Clarkson, obviously, has the valid point and it’s high time the police appointed some managers who can actually get jobs done correctly and efficiently to replace the current set, who are just good for spouting BS.

Premature badguyism

Someone needs to tell S. Vettel that the Schumacher Manoeuvre, where you blunder off the track, and come back on to crash out an unblundered rival, should be done only in the last Grand Prix of the season.

Not the hoped for outcome

Okay, it was 2-1 for England against Scotland in the Ladies’ World Cup, but that’s still no excuse for pre-match pessimism.

Quarter-hearted?

"To some extent, the result doesn't matter", the Sunday Post editorial said about tonight's Scotland vs England match in the Female Football World Cup. Wrong! Only a win will do for Scotland's ladies and they don't need Scotland's fave newspaper being less than 100% confident of their success.

Small discrapancy (sic)

Something curious I’ve noticed when watching films with the subtitles on – e.g when the diction is appalling and/or the sound all over the place – is that captions like [siren wails] appear on the screen but often, no siren sound is audible.
    This suggests that the titles are derived from a script and never checked against the final editing job by a Titles Monitor. Or by an FX Monitor to make sure that the noises and gadgets match the titles.

Self-inflicted wound

Still on Michael Gove: he’s shooting himself in the foot by telling people not to hold his history as a coke-head against him in the Tory leadership stakes. Tell people they can’t do something and they will immediately do it, just to prove you wrong.

I was a really BAD boy

The Tory leadership wannabes are parading their drug history; mainly at an ‘I didn’t inhale’ level; but why? In Gove’s case, he’s helping to plug a book about himself. Does that mean the others are hoping someone will do the same for them?

Still in decline

I’ve been doing more clicks on the Stats button where I post these words of wisdom and noticed that the trend is continuing. The Blogger PacMan is still munching away and the number of visits for last month has been declining as the PacMonster consumes them.

Important, but not as we know it, Jim

Should I bow my head in shame for having heard of only 4 of Britain’s 27 Most Important Wimmin (according to Vogue)? Or just accept that women are from Venus and their concept of important doesn’t apply to me?

They said it!

I saw an advert for “Rubbish Removals” in a free newspaper and immediately thought I’d rather go to someone who can do a proper job of shifting my stuff if I ever move out of the Mansion.

Tell us something relevant

We’re told that we consume a quarter of a million micro-particles of plastic per year. But so what? The air we breathe is full of crap – inorganic dust particles, pollen and all sorts of other organic plant debris.
    What we really need is context and risk potential rather than just a naked and useless number.

Weird bunch

Why do Americans have this strange obsession with candles? You get them in abundance in SF TV series like Star Trek and Babylon 5, and in situations where a roomful of lit candles should be an unacceptable fire risk.

Misery for the many, not the few

Corbyn and his crew are planning to steal all private property if they get into power. What a mealy mouthed bunch of stone cold losers they are if they daren’t go the whole hog and reveal that they’d like to kill everyone they don’t approve of and steal everything they possess. Have they learnt nothing from the terrorists and dictators they’ve cosied up to?
    They’re miserable Marxists in the sense of being piss-poor at it.
    And that concludes today’s rant.

Another big mystery

Tony Curtis likened kissing Marilyn Monroe to kissing Hitler. But how did he know what kissing Hitler was like to be so expert about it?

We need more shades of Evil

We have evil itself, which is Force 10 on the scale, and medievil, which is half-way or Force 5. But in these judgemental times, we need more defined points on the scale. Such as decievil, which is Force 1, for pushy but fairly ineffective do-gooders who end up doing a little bad.
    Suggestions for other points on the scale welcomed on a PC to the usual address.

Typical

It seems to happen a lot. A team battles to the final of a tournament and then fails to show up at the last gasp. Which is exactly what happened to Spurs against Liverpool in the Champions’ League. Which must have been a real sickener for their fans.

It’s all about the money!

Will Agent Pride survive in the new series of NCIS: New Orleans? we keep being asked in trailers. It all depends how much he’s bunged the scriptwriter to keep his job.

F1 can’t compete with this

Nice to see 3 Ducatis duffing up Marc Marquez in the early stages of the Italian MotoGP. Rossi in the kitty litter? Yay! Rins on a Suzuki carving up the 4 leaders; until Miller fell off after setting a fastest lap. Nice to see Petrucci get his first ever win and Marquez spoiling a Ducati one-two finish.

A rip in the direction of off?

There was an absolutely interminable advert for plastic shoes on TV last night. It was full of people of all ages walking about on flat surfaces and even tackling steps. But nowhere throughout the entire thing did they mention how much they cost. Always a bad sign in my experience.

Unstoppable legend

There’s a thirty-fifth Godzilla film just out? What can they possibly do for a sequel? How about Godzilla vs Devilzilla. That would fill a few cinemas.

Nothing to worry about

Not if today’s headline news is about Sir P. Green’s peccadillos rather than anything else going on in the world. They are totally trivial compared to, say, lying to Parliament about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction to get a war started.

A minor mystery

I had a glimpse of a small van today bearing a slogan that was about “mobile plants”. It zoomed off before I could read the rest and ask the driver if the mobile plants concerned had wheels or legs.

Must do better

The leaks of the plot of the next Bond film are being described as chilling. Which doesn’t sound all that thrilling. Who’d pay good money to see James Bond chilling and doing a David Cameron impression in a caravan or an expensive hot tub?

Could even be a hate crime

Dragging Boris Johnson into court is an actual pyramid of piffle. If anyone deserves a milk shake, it’s that hissy Bremoaner twerp who’s trying to stifle Brexit.

Not even close

The BBC was describing the current prime minister as ‘outgoing’ on the lunchtime TV news. Wrong. She’s actually very reserved and uncommunicative, according to reports from those who have met her.

Tripe endures

Van der Valk, 30 years ago, and there was a silly story being spread that global warming will wipe out Holland’s reclaimed land by 2030.
    Right now, there’s a Democrap member of the US House of Representatives claiming that the world will end in 2030 unless everyone does what she says.

Handy scrapegoats

Is it fair to blame the Tories if the electorate is stupid enough to vote in an economy-wrecking Labour government. Actually, no. But since when has life been fair?

Okay, it’s not live but so what!

I wonder why Sky Sports advertises its F1 channel (complete with the obnoxious shouty bloke) during the free-to-air Channel 4 versions of the races? Why pay 30-odd quid per month for something which just involved putting up with a few adverts when it’s on Channel 4?

What would they do without Brexit?

An interesting snippet in the Dominic Lawson column in today’s Daily Mail: immoral businesses like BA invent bogus EU regulations when customers complain about poor service and then complain about the excuse offered.

Just not bloody trying – to do a good job, that is

I quickly switched on the subtitles for that film on Channel 4 after the Grand Prix – Arrival. The cast were either SHOUTING or inaudible all the way through. Not a brilliant production job. Even the subtitles for what the aliens were saying were so badly placed as to be illegible a lot of the time.

Utter tripe

“Mount Everest has claimed 10 lives already this season”, we are assured. B.S. Mountains are not serial killers. They just sit there, indifferent to the life-forms that crawl about on them.

Didn’t watch it myself

There has been a remake of The Italian Job, I noticed when studying last night’s TV menu. Who’s going to watch that? was my reaction. After all, if the original is a classic with a faultless cast of real stars, doing a remake can only be pointless.

Not saving the world

Don’t you just love it when a public body tries to wave a virtue flag and fails miserably. Like the mob in London, who are trying to impose a 15 mph speed limit on an area where the average daytime speed is just 8 mph.

Things you learn from TV

Blimey! The Islamic Jihad mob was causing bother back when the Equalizer was shooting bad guys in New York 30-odd years ago. This came out of an episode in which Robert McCall was aiding a Sarf Efrican terrorist, who was female and not at all that blick. But she ended up a good terrorist. 23 million more to go, McCall told the SA diplomat, whose life he had just saved.

There’s no luvvie demand for it

Strange that no one is planning to remake Othello with a white person in the lead and a non-white Iago. But diversity and casual racialism seems to go in only one direction.

The 21st Century Unreliable English Dictionary

Letter M:
molested (n) – it’s like a homestead but for moles.

This should work

Given the uniformly dreadful performance of Britain’s police farces, maybe we need to try to recruit some Texas Rangers. Even the girls can beat the crap out of bad guys in their documentaries on the CBS Justice TV channel.

Things I never knew No. 384

An Asian woman who has an affair with a white European man is a bacon basher.

To boldly go where no one else is daft enough to

That’s the only conclusion to be derived from the Star Trek:TNG episode Rascals, in which Captain Picard and three others end up in teenage bodies with unchanged mentalities. I’m not sure which came first, this epic or the episode of Stargate SG-1, in which Colonel O’Neill suffered the same fate.

Privacy vs Security

People who indulge in what the majority of law-abiding citizens would term anti-social behaviour want the police to stop doing facial recognition scans of them in public places.
    The police claim that scans which don’t push a panic button are destroyed immediately. But which side of the argument does anyone trust least – the police or agitators?

Time loop

After watching again the film version of H.G. Wells’ Things To Come, it struck me that we’re still living the plot with the climate cowboys playing the role of the technophobes and pretending that they can prevent change, which is the natural order of things. That saying about people who forget the past are doomed to keep reliving it was never more true.