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.