Quiet in another sense

There are local council elections in a couple of days but you’d never know it. No signs up demanding votes, no leaflets through the door and no canvassers. The total shambles created over Brexit seems to have turned politics into something furtive and unmentionable.

A quiet life

Given the choice, I’d rather watch a Formula One Grand Prix race on Channel 4 than Sky, if only to get away from Sky’s shouty bloke. Neither of the pair commentating for C4 ever feels the need to thrash himself into a frenzy over a passing manoeuvre for 15th place.

The easy blame game

A professor has blamed closures of heavy industry; coal, steel, shipbuilding, etc.; when Margaret Thatcher was president for a significant increase in crime in the affected areas.
    The message seems to be that the closures weren’t due to all these things becoming cheaper abroad. Rather that Mrs. Thatcher did it on a whim because she wasn’t a nice person. Sounds like the study was done by Professor B. Elton.

Who dreams up this stuff!

There was a TV advert which used to make a big deal out of taking only one bottle into the shower because the shampoo also contained conditioner. Now, multi-bottle expeditions seem to be fashionable.
    There’s this young lady who has a special shampoo for the hair ‘down there’ because it has a different pH. Presumably, she also has further bottles the hair on her legs and under her arms. And then there’s the issue of whether hair ‘down there’, which isn’t usually on show, needs conditioner.
    Life can get very complicated if you let the advertisers get to you!

Fell over in amazement

Listened to the News Quiz on Radio 4 this lunchtime – it was remarkably free of usual suspects (except for Mark Steel, who is always welcome) – and it was funny!!!
    Has there been a coup at the Beeb?

Highly adaptable

Watching an ancient episode of Van der Valk on TV the other day, I was struck by how alien it was in setting as well as time. Which set me wondering if, when Scandinavian Noir became fashionable, someone remembered Kommissaris Valk and realized that a British audience could handle alien cop shows.

If so, who cares?

If it’s true that Olympics star Mo Farah was involved in a brawl in a gym, are we outraged? Not even slightly bovvered, myself. Especially if the bloke trying to stitch Mo up is doing it out of embarrassment over Mo being robbed at his hotel.

Bond 25 ain’t Black

James Bond vs Freddie Mercury in the next epic? Sounds like fun; as long as we remember to call the bimbos ‘persons in supplementary roles’ rather than gals – something they’re a little old to be.

Sorry you asked?

“Hey, how are you feeling on this wonderful morning?”
    “Like I’m sitting on a superloo with a toilet roll in front of me and another behind me and they’ve both nearly run out.”

The truth behind the stat

Britons throw away food worth £494 million every week? I don’t even spend a tiny fraction of that on food, so thanks to whoever is handling my share. But the statistic certainly makes all the experts who claim the world can’t grow enough food to feed the population look like idiots.
    Distribution, not production, is clearly the real problem.

Train wreck

What’s going on? Just about everything I watched on TV last evening ended up “to be continued . . .” Which means that I have to remember what happened previously in three shows. Is this a record?

So much for her 15 minutes

“Listen to the science,” a Swedish child ecologist told us in her TV lecture. Which invites the reply: “If you haven’t, why should anyone else?”

Detectors set to maximum

You need a pretty good stopwatch to time the interval between someone yanking the ring-pull on a tin of tuna in springwater and the cat arriving with a hopeful look on her face.

Someone’s doing okay out of it

983 arrests for yobism by ecolouts and only 40 charges? Lots of lovely overtime for the police of the Metropolis, though.

Ain’t life confusing at times!

Ho, ho, ho! It’s Easter on Earth but a couple of days before Xmas in Starsky & Hutchland. Something Hutch does not enjoy. Donner und Blitzkrieg. TV is definitely another country.

Advice for travellers No. 113

“Her price is far above rubles” – if so, better take some dollars on your next trip to Russia if you want to get lucky.

One of Evolution’s flops. Bye-ee!

That pathetic little clown doing the whinge for the TV cameras about not wanting to be the last generation was utterly priceless. But if that’s the best the human race can manage, it deserves to go extinct.

No need to panic

Is the PM going to be bothered over the refusal of Tory local councillors and their Conservative Associations (my local one included) to canvas for the Euro elections? Given her limited shelf life right now, probably not. And there’s no nonsense about securing her legacy because she doesn’t have one. Brexit didn’t mean Brexit.

High tech, low use

I won’t be investing in one of the new Samsung phones with a screen which folds in half when it’s not in use. Not if their working life is anything between a few hours and a couple of days!

Very enterprising

I was amused to read that Lyme Regis is getting round the ban on doing away with seagulls which attack people by hiring tame eagles to frighten the gulls away and make them someone else’s problem.

Zero expectations; or even less

We’ve become so used to the police being useless, like the ones letting lefty ecoyobs run riot in London, that we’re surprised only when them manage to achieve something useful. And those surprises seem to be very few and far between.

Rule No. 1 for amateur chefs

Never let your knives be too sharp so that they bounce off on contact with your fingers, sparing you a starring role in an episode of Me & A & E.

Don’t bother me now

The survival of a big, gilded crucifix in Notre Dame cathedral is being touted as a miracle by at least one over-excited journo – mainly because it takes a good photo. But what’s the message in the miracle?
    “Omnipresent, all-seeing and all-powerful God was here, cudda saved the whole building but chose not to get involved beyond a very small gesture.”
    That certainly puts the value God places on customer service in high perspective.

Virtue flag waved

“Think climate, wash at 30 deg.C”
Won’t make any difference to the climate but you can pretend it has.

Self-possession to the max

Why is it that the cat never takes any notice when another cat is miaowing its head off in a TV drama just a couple or three yards away? Not a flicker. No desire to check out a potential friend or rival. Nada.

Job creation?

No doubt the authorities in Glasgow, who allowed their iconic School of Art to be burnt to the ground not once but twice during restoration work, are feeling a little less isolated after the fire that gutted Notre Dame cathedral in Paris.
    One favourable spin-off is that the cathedral is likely to get all the cash it needs for rebuilding after the French government offered just £40 million of the £130 million needed pre-fire.

The Doctor duffed up

Good job there’s MotoGP to give motorsport fans some excitement. Marc Marquez beat himself and fell off at the Circuit of the Americas (what, all of them?) And let Alex Rins win his first ever MotoGP race in Texas. Shame the battered Cal Crutchlow couldn’t stay on his bike.

No need to panic

I was interested to read that Nepal is sending a team of surveyors to the top of Mount Everest to find out if the mountain has shrunk following an earthquake of almost 8 on the Richter scale in the region in April 2015. Informed opinion is that the highest mountain on land has nothing to worry about.

No excitement in China

Predictably, the 1,000th F1 Grand Prix race, in China, was a routine procession to a win for the British driver, which is as it should be. There was a bit of dodgems on the first lap, then it all settled down.

Recycled mouse, anyone?

The wildlife around the Mansion includes mice. None indoors, and no one has seen one running around outdoors, but gardeners have reported finding half-chewed bodies from time to time. And then wondered what to do with them.
    Is it the black bin for a decent burial in landfill? Or the green bin for recycling organic stuff?

A knotty problem!

Amazon has been force to admit that it has employees listening in on customers who use the Alexa gadget. But they’re not allowed to call the cops if they hear someone being raped or murdered. We obviously need a new proverb for Amazon: Two wrongs make a MegaWrong.

Slight complication

Don’t you just love it when the SNP try to be annoying and get their bums bitten! They want to stay in the EU and they want independence. But, as the PM pointed out to their figurehead, if Scotland becomes independent of the UK, that’s its membership of the EU gone. And applying to join, even if the EU is willing to accept another drain on its finances, would take years.
    Net result: an independent Scotland loses both direct subsidies from the English taxpayer and the indirect ones, which it gets via EU grants.

Multitasking

I was surprised to read that firemen in the Devon & Somerset service have consented to train as special constables so that they can nick villains when there are no fires to put out. Such flexibility is highly unusual when trade unions are involved.

Trust a politician? Right!

One day, the gang in Ecuador say they have no intention of booting out their resident fugitive from justice, who has been in their London embassy for 7 years. The next, he’s having his collar felt by the Old Bill and looking like Howard Hughes. No doubt there’s a fumigation squad on the job as I write.

What do you have to do to be a Web billionaire?

To be like the Twitter billionaire, you have to have only one meal a day, you have to starve through grub-free weekends and in the morning, you have to walk five miles to work after an ice bath between sessions in a sauna. And you don’t get any breakfast as the only meal you’re allowed is dinner.
    No, thanks!

No great loss

We’re told the Tories are worried that their party will vanish if it doesn’t appeal to the young. Which means they are in dead trouble as the current bunch of deadlegs has no appeal for anyone. Given that the same applies to all the other parties, we can dream that MPs will become extinct whilst knowing the crooks will never leave us alone.

Took a bit longer than Mr. Orwell expected

It has been pointed out that the gap between when the novel 1984 was finished and when it is set is now the same as the gap between 1984 and now, when the Home and Culture Secs. are conspiring to put censorship of the internet into the hands of the government.

Crap campaign

Instant coffee for “the moments that matter”? That’s definitely one from the fevered pen of our old TV advertising mate Lou Dicrous.

A REAL threat

Why are we wasting so much time on Brexit when there are much greater challenges to be faced? Such as the fact that if Godzilla explodes, that will cause the atmosphere to expode and wipe out all life on the planet. See Godzilla vs Destroyah on UTube.

What went wrong?

Falls over in amazement. An industrial tribunal actually threw out the case of a teacher, who couldn’t read or write, who was sacked after the head teacher of the school discovered he couldn’t read or write.

Only one area of agreement

40% of people would rather have a biometric log-in, 30% prefer a password. And 100% would rather not have to mess about with either of the above because there is a ruthlessly imposed death penalty for on-line fraud and personation applied everywhere on the planet.

A funny BBC comedy!

DUPPI on Radio 4's The Now Show was absolutely priceless. The laughter stops next week, though, when the luvvie News Swiz returns.

When you think about it . . .

The prime minister is making a really big deal about The Union; probably as a preliminary to ditching it; but do we really need it? We could get along okay without the Welsh, the Irish have always been nothing but trouble and as for the Scots, they only signed up because they were flat broke, their rulers having done a Gordon Brown and blown the nation’s wealth on a mad colony scheme in Central America. England on its own would do okay.

Not many Persians left, either

Reading about Brexit; well, skipping through the pages of shambles reports in the paper; I noticed that someone thought it was a good idea to point out that the original Spartans, who held the pass at Thermopylae for a while, all died. Which misses the point completely and wasn’t worth printing; except to embarrass whoever was being quoted, of course.

Pull the other one

You have to wonder at the mentality of the people who write TV ads and the people who hire them. Like the gang who decided that people would buy a brand of toothpaste because it contains two ingredients ‘found in Nature’.
    Well, you can say the same about cyanide, nicotine, snake venom and every plant poison under the sun. Not to mention lead and other heavy metals. It’s not really that much of a recommendation.

Another frustrating thing that cats do

She walks to the back door and sits down. You open it and she turns round and goes the other way. A few minutes later, the same door is getting the Monet treatment. That’s the cat telling you it has to be her idea to go out and she doesn’t need hints from mere humans.

Get it right next time!

It seems that the Paras who filmed themselves shooting up a picture of J. Corbyn, the terrorist’s friend, in Afghanistan were just using paintballs rather than real bullets. The Looney Left are up in arms at this slight and the implication that he isn’t worth hot lead.

More of this would be good

‘His remains are in custody at a police station’, implying that the cops short-circuited the legal process on someone who had it coming and saved the taxpayer a bomb, and only the lawyers are weeping.

Nothing wrong with that

Why shouldn’t soldiers use a picture of J. Corbyn for target practice. Freedom of self expression is a basis ’uman bloody right.

Incredible TV ad No. 149

Does anyone at all believe that an insurance company would send a guy who behaves like a cheap American hood round to help out someone whose rival insurance company has left them down? Pur-lease!

They’re all at it

Nice to know that the Democrats are less virtuous than they pretend. “Creepy Uncle Joe” Biden, their presidential hopeful, has been included in the growing list of political sex pests. “Fake news,” is his response.

TV adverts that defy reason

We will meet nearly 80,000 people in our lives so we have to drink instant coffee. Logic, but not as we know it, Jim.

Too obvious

“PM will not quit and may lead Tories into snap poll” – has to be an April Fool. Either that, or it’s Larry the cat’s cat-flap in the front door of 10 Downing Street.

The power of progress

New technology always has a snag. What could it be in the case of the wonderful gadget which fills a room with either cooled or heated purified air? Without bothering to check, my guess would be that the filters cost a fiver a time and they last about three days under heavy usage.