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]