Doom ‘n’ gloom

Isn’t it going dark early all of a sudden? Not that it matters if I’ve lost the habit of going out in the evening thanks to the Chinese plague.

Just incredible

I noticed that an Aldi TV advert had a ‘4 for £1’ packet of Mars bars prominently in the centre long after Mars shoved the price up by one-third by making it 3 for a quid. Out of curiosity, I went to the Aldi website to check the price there. But a search for Mars bars produced a list of 'matching items' which started with a 6-quid bottle of white wine, a Paw Patrol Marshal towel, orange rice cakes and fruit&nut bars.
    Feeling like the universe had been shifted a couple of feet to the left, I abandoned my quest.

Painless progress

Putting the Belgian Grand Prix on record, going to replay whilst it was still showing, watching just the race and zooming through ads, and going to fast-forward for the last dozen laps or so let me see all the bits I wanted before the 9 p.m. finish of the programme on Channel 9.
    That was dreadfully confected excitement by the shouty bloke at the finish. They should definitely restore the bus stop to its former rectangularity.

Lone gone freedom

Watching the Fast Show retrospective made me realize that it was possible to create a first-rate comedy show without diversity as late as the 1990s. These days, there would be a token white bloke in the cast, who would also be the token bloke.

Out of the box

A member of the Scottish Parliament is agitating for a museum celebrating Scotland’s links with the slave trade of bygone years as a way of regenerating a deprived area. Nothing like a spot of lateral thinking when conventional ideas run out.

Not me, mate!

How many of the Daily Mail’s 60 must-watch programmes & series will I be visiting over the coming months? I’ll probably watch the F1 Grand Prix races; on Channel 4, not Sky; and that’s about it. Which will spare me hours, days, weeks? in front of the goggle box.

Brilliant idea

The WW should be commissioned to stage the Last Night of the Proms this year – and do it in their Thunderdome to provide an artificial audience!

Fugitive celebrity

The lead item on the lunchtime news was the death of a film actor, who was offered as one of the greatest of all time. Something I find hard to believe if I’d never heard of him.

You couldn’t make it up

With utter amazement, I read that under-30s consider a full stop at the end of a text to be as threatening as shoving a gun in their face. You have to really desperate for a feeling of being got-at to confect outrage as feeble as that!

Cancellation overdue

Half a million pounds in legal aid for the 3 tossers who got away with murdering PC Andrew Harper just confirms what legal aid is all about. It’s a racket to shove taxpayers’ cash into the pockets of the legal trade and sod justice.

Inflation rules, OK

The bloke with the knife in Wisconsin who was shot 7 times by the police – that was inflated to 8 times by Wednesday. 10 times by the beginning of next week?

One way out

As an alternative to a karaoke version of the Last Night of the Proms with no singing, why not show a classic repeat from a year when it was done properly? One more repeat on the BBC won’t make much difference.

World’s worst TV ad?

An advert for M&S mince has what looks like red and uncooked mince being dolloped on limp and therefore cooked spaghetti. Not anything I’d be in a rush to eat!

Horses 4 courses

If an actress who dresses as a female is going to go on TV to do a show in which ‘she’ claims she’s not sure which sex she is, I suppose it helps if she could pass for a bloke who’s been got up to look like a woman.

Weird concept

The electric MINI has an engine so quiet that you can hear the punk rubber song? And that’s supposed to be some sort of recommendation?

Temporary satisfaction

That heycar TV ad is good – thanks to the right music. But whether it will sound as good by the 500th repetition remains to be seen.

Sounds highly likely!

The world is being run by a sinister coalition of Satanic paedophiles, cannibals and Hollywood wonks? That’s the message going around in the United States. And it makes a lot of things make sense.
    I would definitely buy it for a dollar. If I had one.

Half the truth ain’t better than none

Police officers don’t start shooting without cause. Strange that the TV news pictures of someone being shot are never accompanied by an account of what the shootee did to provoke this reaction.

Afterthought

Strip out the New Wave garbage and there might be a readable longish short story to be made out of The Black Corridor. But less income for the author, of course.

Total control

The WW’s imaginary audience of pictures is something that must have taken AGES to build! And it offers total control over the phoney crowd reaction. There’s obviously someone of imagination there.
    Sadly, the WW is also full of dead-brained bozos who keep writing the trip in an ambulance after a backstage assault into the script. And the BLAME gang. What a load of rubbish they are.

Timely warning

I’m currently wading through Michael Moorcock’s The Black Corridor, which is the last in a collection of 3 novels. It’s loaded with 1960s New Wave wibble but it does offer the interesting idea of the current plague of diversification and entitlement turning everyone else paranoid to the point of obliteration by a nuclear war. Could happen!

Nothing to write home about

If we want a different sort of policing, Society is going to have to provide the cops with a better class of customers. Doing away with all the ones who get drunk or drugged up, violent, abusive and entitled will be a great start.

Sneaky switch

When you see VAT on a bill, beware. Instead of Value Added Tax, it could be Virus Added Tax to make up by stealth for lost profits.

Tripe without any onions

A Daily Mail journalist who’s on holiday in Sweden visited an overpriced supermarket and found that no one ‘recoiled in horror when our trolley came within 5 metres of them’ and people didn’t ‘shrink in terror if another shopper appeared in the aisle, as is the norm in British supermarkets’.
    What utter bollocks! has been the reaction of everyone here who has been to a supermarket recently. Clearly, no one has told the guy that if you’re going to make something up that people might believe, it’s a good idea not to stray too far into fantasy land.

Bum!

Just checked the Canadian Football League website and there’s nothing this year. The focus has been shifted to next year. Damn those Chinese plague spreaders.

Political sense, but not as we know it, Jim

Bill Clinton’s missus has decided that people didn’t bother to go out and vote for her because they thought she’d be crap as US president. Now, she’s nagging at people to go out and vote for Mr. Bidet to ensure that America gets its crap president.

How old are TV ads?

I started asking myself this in response to endless strings of them featuring people behaving normally and no one wearing a face mask or doing safe spacing. Except for one by Vistaprint flogging masks, of course.

Small mystery

There was a story in the paper at the weekend about a farmer being outraged because the PM camped in his field without asking permission and lit a camp fire which could have burned the whole area to the ground. This is in rain-sodden Scotland, by the way. And something even more incredible is the lack of a mention of Boris’ armed security team. Sounds very confected to fill up a bit of space to me.

Get it right

It’s a lockdown quibble but shouldn’t prices in TV adverts be down to half-price rather than up to?

Miserable hit rate

How many of our 20 ‘favourite tunes’ are ones I know? Just seven. Back to the drawing board for Virgin Media’s survey team.

Yet more red

There was bumping and barging at the start of the MotoGP race. And a red flag in the 2nd race in succession on lap 17/28 when Viñales had to roll off his bike, which had no brakes and zoomed on to end up in flames in an air-bag barrier!
    The race resumed with a 12-lap sprint this week. And what a finish!

Know the way round

One big advantage of having done a weekend’s racing in Austria was a lot less crashing in Moto3. Apart from the spectacular one on lap 19/23. And the Brit McPhee biting the dust on lap 22.
    Moto2 had some unusual early crashes, including the British guy on lap 3. Then it settled down to hard, technical racing.

More pots & kettles

I had to laugh when I heard ex-president Clinton slagging off current President Trump for what he gets up to in the Oval Office. Is everyone supposed to have forgotten what Slick Willy got up to there? The things he was hauled in front of an impeachment court for lying about?

World racing centre

Another Austrian MotoGP but with a different name? If there are no spectators and travelling is not a good idea, why not just keep everyone here and fly the appropriate national flag for the other events?

Consciousness alternative

Is it true that cats can sleep anywhere? Well, I’ve seen the Mansion cat fast asleep on a computer keyboard. And, no doubt, clogging up the keys with little cat hairs.

Absence incentive

Friday is pay day, one of my mates reckons. His daughter has noticed that her street is a solid line of cars on both sides of the road most days. But on a Friday, you can park more or less anywhere you like.

In tune

You certainly can’t accuse the WW of not noticing what is going on in the world. Thus it now has gangs of masked thugs running riot on its shows. BLAME it on society! And it saves having to put on much of a wrestling show.

Keeps them off the streets?

It seems the world’s bean-counters are busy trying to guestimate the amount of plastic sloshing around in the oceans. Thus far, they’ve managed to boost the amount they reckon is in the Atlantic from 25 to 300 million tons.
    Won’t be long before they do their sums for the entire planet; and come up with a figure which is a zillion times greater than all the plastic ever produced anywhere through our history.
    No doubt aliens fly-tippers will get the blame then.

Bunch of slackers

The nation’s woke wonders, on one of their censorship jags,  are trying to cancel the names of every creature and plant they don't approve of. So how come they’ve done sod all about ladyboy sofas? Which were advertised on early evening TV last night?

Not much confidence, actually

The brother of the Manchester Arena bomber has been given 22 life sentences and a tariff of 55 years. Cynics are now laying bets on how long it will take the ’uman rights mob and the court of appeal to trim that back to 55 months.

Real or mirage

I’ve just been looking at pictures in one of the collection of newspapers of people larking around in Wuhan, the source of the Chinese plague, with no regard for safe, social or smart spacing. According to the government there, the plague is completely over. Is there a pinch of salt big enough to go with that?

More than enough blame to go right around

I’ve just been looking at some numbers for grade inflations for A-Levels in this non-examination year. The much maligned algorithm used by the Education Department created inflation of the order of a few per cent. But when guestimates by teachers are used, the inflation can get up to 50%+.
    Which just goes to show that using the teacher estimates confirms that politics is all about giving the people what they want, even if it turns out to be valueless.

New style of outing

If I’m ever really stuck for something to do, the answer will be to head for the coast with a £20 note in my pocket and take one of the boat rides out to visit a stranded cruise liner.
    No chance of going aboard, of course, but there will be a chance to get close at sea level and see just how massive these ships are. And, maybe, get a chance to wave to the Officer of the Day.

Just amazing

My mind is still boggling at the story of the bloke who lied his head off about his qualifications to get a top job in the NHS and held that job for 12 years because no one bothered to check up on him. And when he was finally busted, a judge decided that he’d done such good work that he could be let off.

Not very informative

According to the experts, 90% of children are aware that there is such a thing as fake news. Strange that these experts haven’t gone on to find out how many of the 90% can tell real news from the fake stuff.

Outrage for all dog lovers!

The regime in plague-free North Korea has admitted that there is a severe food shortage by ordering dog owners to hand over their decadent and bourgeois pets for use as ‘restaurant meat’. What’s next??

No sense of timing

The film industry, and some SF authors, have no conception of the pace of events. We should have sent manned expeditions to most of the planets by now if SF had been making predictions instead of telling stories.
    Another film last night, Futuresport, was made in 1998. It offers its Rollerball rip-off as an alternative to war in 2025. But I suppose the people who made the film weren’t to know we’d still be recovering from a global pandemic then and not really in a position to be warring.

Oh, dear!

Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle was on last night. The girls alternate between rootin’, tootin’ capable agents and cartoon characters. And Bosley is a poofterish cartoon black bloke. As for a plot, forget it! Just watch the succession of wild stunts.

Just complete the shambles

If no one has taken exams and teachers can’t be trusted to award reasonably accurate assessments, the only way out of the current crisis seems to be for the government to take the pragmatic approach of awarding everyone an “A” grade and leaving this year’s ‘results’ out of the record books.

Eternally damned

I can’t imagine why LV insurance keeps using the bloke going Dom-Diddy in their TV adverts. Unless it’s like the punk rubber song and a case of: “Yes, it’s crap but it’s our image and we’re stuck with it.”

No wonky tyres

Therefore no interest in the Spanish GP. There must be a message in there somewhere.
    Any rain on offer? Nope.

More red

Another red flag in the MotoGP race in Austria. Two riders walked away, just wounded, from a 200 mph clash, and the GOAT, Mr. Rossi, was nearly killed by a bike which went right over his head at a bend.
    There were some less spectacular crashes in the 20 laps left, and the race was won by Dovi, who has been ditched by his team, Ducati. But what do they know?

Any way the wind blows

Ms Kalamity, the top-job hopeful of US polyticks, has proven herself to be a true out-for-herselfer. She’ll trash anyone and anything inconvenient, as she did to Joke Bidet when trying to get his pole position, and then claim the trash is the bee’s knees if it suits her. She should go far.

Weird concept

Having to make an appointment to go to an A&E department this winter, when the plague and flu are rampant, is on the agenda.
    “Hello? I’d like to make an appointment for a week on Friday. What for? I think I’m going to break my leg then.”

Red day in Austria

Excursions on to the red stuff in the Austrian Moto3 GP, never mind the green stuff! The British guy and Basher Binder both held the lead briefly but neither could make it stick.
    More visits to the red stuff in Moto2 then a red flag on lap 4/25 when Bastianini lost it, left his bike in the middle of the track and Syahrin smashed in to it. The two guys who just missed the bike to left and right also crashed.
    It was a 13 lap sprint at the restart and the British guy kept bogging up, to the disgust of the commentators, and managed just 4th.

Bright to the point of luminous!

I’ve just read that the National Trust has come up with a wizard idea for not pandering to the confectors and removing everything from the slavery era from its properties. The stuff is being left in place to ‘inspire debate’. Great excuse for doing absolutely nothing.

Bogus Grades

No surprise that the Labour party is supporting its paymaster-in-part the teaching unions over alternative A-Level grades. Labour has always been the party of non-achievers with its ‘everyone is a winner, competition is evil’ culture.
    Just look at who its recent leaders have been; Miliband, Corbyn and especially the current one, who didn’t exactly shine as the ‘Director of Pubic Prostitutions’ pre-politics.

One-way gratitude

People have been bitching in the Daily Mail about the quality of items received from their firm at their leaving do. No one, however, seems to have bothered to write a letter of appreciation to the Chairman of the Board for providing however many years were received of the dignity of employment.

There’s always someone

There’s always a rush to be the biggest victim when A-Level results are handed out at this time of year. The clear winner this year has to be the 60,000 kids who were educated at home and don’t have teacher assessments and/or mock exam results to offer.

Unnatural Selection

Just been avoiding the oily guff about the oily guff in the latest book about Prince Hairy & Meghan but the message on the surface seems to be that Meghan considers herself to be black when she on the lookout for racial insults.
    Which is, in itself, a nasty insult to her white father. But maybe he’s not woke enough to count.

Another over-egged pudding

Are we really expected to believe that having a TV is a ‘lifeline’ for all of the 3.7 over-75s who have been deprived of a free licence?
    I’m willing to bet that at least half of them can find other things to do than gawp at the goggle box. And the ones who can use a computer will be able to find lots of other stuff to gawp at.

And the end was just as naff

Ric Flair must really need the money. It’s difficult to know who’s the more tedious now, Orton the Veins bloke, or the Monday Nite Moron, what’s his face, who now sounds just as whiney as the child Rusty in the Major Crimes TV series.

WW Worthless

The first half-hour of Monday Nite RAW was total crap and shameless assault & battery of the human anatomy. No wonder I zipped through it in 8 minutes.

Back to the drawing board

I keep hearing a brief snatch of the ‘punk rubber’ song when I’m ignoring the TV adverts. The snatches are so brief that by the time I’ve connected them with last month's longer ads, there’s another one on the screen.
    I’m now wondering if it’s a sort of semi-subliminal gimmick, which will send me dashing out to buy the product concerned; if only I can remember what it is!

Past glories

Does it do any favours to actresses to print cheesecake pictures from when they were young in the papers now that they have aged a few decades? Maybe the ‘any publicity is publicity’ rule applies.

No Sale

“We all use too much water” claims a TV advert. Or do we? Could it be just a bunch of spivs trying to shame us into buying their fancy gadget?

I wish

If only someone would throw ex-princess Meggan under a bus for real. It might stop the stream of endless whinges.

What a relief!

Knowing we’re in the worst slump for 100 years, rather than the worst for 300 years, has cheered me up enormously.

Sound strategy

The electoral fun & games in the former White Russia prove that if you’ve got your feet under the table and you’ve paid off all the right people, you’re still unshiftable. Especially if the opposition isn’t kill-crazy.

Crime against sanity

Don’t you just hate to the point of executing all the first-born, the habit MicroSoft’s Windows operating system has of selecting a load of stuff to the right of the cursor when you want the stuff on the left?

Tech devolution

Those dodgy tyres are definitely putting a bit of interest back into Formula One. Which has to leave the organizers wondering what else they can do to sabotage things a bit more.

If it’s taxpayers’ money . . .

Teachers need to be told that if they clock in for work; as verified by CCTV; they’ll be paid. If they don’t, they won’t.

Delivery charges apply

50 face masks for £13. But if you live in the Scottish Highlands & Islands, delivery is 63 quid. Could happen.

Idle fancy

I’ve noticed the company that does the reptile dysfunction TV ads also tackles hair loss. Which means if you tick the wrong box during your online consultation, you could end up with your hair (what’s left of it) standing on end like you’ve plugged your fingers into the mains.
    If that happens, thank goodness for lockdown!

Great finish

Save the tyres? Nope. The MotoGP guys went at it right from the start in the Czech event. Alex Marquez was stuck at the back and brother Marc is still sidelined.
    Zarco had his race blighted by the stewards over a racing incident? He did well to outsmart them and keep 3rd, but could he have finished 2nd? Debatable. Brad Binder was a runaway winner in only his 3rd race in this formula. Nice to see a genuinely open field.

Interesting times

They certainly have weather in Scotland. Everyone off to the beaches this weekend. Warnings of dangerous lightning and life-threatening floods for the start of the coming week!

Weasel Words

“Nobody makes the stuff like us”, claims a TV advert. Is that a recommendation? When you think about it, they could be saying that their product is made by a uniquely bad process and therefore a load of crap.
    Not impressive after all.

The bikers are back

It was a very mannerly Czech Moto3 race and everyone managed to stay on the track until 12 laps to go. Then the attrition began on an unpredictable, slippery track. 18th to 5th for the British guy.
    The Moto2 race was much more spread out, a few individual crashes, and a solid second place for the British bloke.

Aaagh! No news day

You’re getting really desperate for a front page headline if you have to conflate the late Princess Di and the late Jeff Epstein via one of Di’s bridesmaids. Especially if the lady concerned didn’t see anything shockingly horrible.

Things you don’t see all that often

A toilet roll, caught in a shaft of bright sunlight and giving off a blue glow. They must put fluorescent brightening agents in the formula to make them look extra white.

Not impressed

The global warming swindlers still don’t get it. No one is impressed by claims of a world record temperature recorded at Heathrow airport. With all that tarmac and concrete soaking up sunshine, it’s bound to get bloody hot there.
    In fact, we’d only be surprised if it didn’t get hot.

Over-egged pudding

There’s bright red on the BBC weather map for my part of the country; where there is pretty total cloud coverage and the Sun just almost peeps out occasionally. No danger of a record temperature here.
    Believe the TV or believe what I can see out of the window? What a dilemma.

Eating towards an early grave?

There’s a picture in Tuesday’s paper of two ladies about to lunch on individual pizzas as big as their dinner plates, taking advantage of the taxpayer’s Monday to Wednesday generosity. My reaction was amazement that they hadn’t bought just one pizza to share.
    One-third of a pizza that size would be enough for me as a course @ dinnertime. No wonder there’s so much obesity around.
    Unless the ladies were planning to scoff one-third of their pizzas and take the rest home to eat as lunch on unsubsidized Thursday & Friday.

Old plots never die

This threat to shut the pubs to get schools reopened is reminiscent of the scene in an all-action film where the head bad guy points a gun at the head of a hand child and tells the cops: “Back off or the kid gets it.”
    Same with the skiving teachers and their obstructive union, who are being told by the government’s experts: “Back off and get back to work or the pubs get it!”

A touch of reality

The world is beset by a plague exported by the Chinese, but still we get TV adverts for gum disease toothpaste. Isn’t it reassuring to know that life goes on regardless!

Myopic visionary

“The president can’t be a loose cannon”, one of the manipulators sez in The Adjustment Bureau, which is based on an SF short story by P.K. Dick. Clearly, someone like Donald Trump was outwith the scope of Mr. Dick’s imagination.

Unreal life

Isn’t it weird, watching films with people sitting on buses and going into shops and clubbing, and no one wearing a mask! Makes me wonder if real life really was like this once or the film industry is faking it, as usual.

100 years old and excellent

I’ve just read Rossum’s Universal Robots by Karel Chapek in a translation into modern UK idiom by David Short. If you enjoy science fiction, the script of this play is a great read and takes only 99 pages to sort out the human race.

Somewhat compromised

Another TV ad was bragging: “Our smile is our strength”, provoking the response: “Good luck with seeing it behind a bank-robber mask.”

Same or different?

I spotted an ad for what seemed to be a TV show called Martin’s & Rowan’s with the sound on mute and wondered if it could be a rip-off of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh In. But the bods on the screen looked far too young to know anything about the 1970s. And something like Laugh In would never get past the army of self-appointed issue censors around these days.

Brilliant story

Stop press! Russian hackers raided the emails of government ministers and gave stuff to Jeremy Corbyn which ensured that he was wiped out at last year’s general election. A big thank you is due to Mr. Putin for that!

Politician? Well, then!

Can anyone possibly be surprised that the official statistics guys have outed Nicola Sturgeon for telling porkies about the spread of the plague in Scotland?
    And she has only herself to blame. She insists on doing presidential press announcements herself instead of sending minions to lie for her. Ego baffles brains.

Not quite as many yawns @ Silverstone

That was a brilliant scheme to make Formula One moderately interesting again – putting random faults into the supply of tyres to shake things up a bit.

One giant leap backwards

Good for SpaceX, doing what NASA can’t any more and ferrying astronauts to and from the ISS from American soil. But it’s rather staggering to realize that it’s 45 years since returning astronauts had to be fished out of the sea because the space shuttle had been invented.

Thank you, we’ll let you know

Crumbs! Who was that weird lady in the red frock Ghod Saving the Qheen @ the British Grand Prix? Don’t you just wish they’d get some competent vocalist who can perform the music without all the wobbles & twiddly bits and restore some dignity to the ritual?
    Oh, no! The shouty bloke was back for the start of the race.

Synthetic failure

The Ars vs Chelski in a Cup Final with an invisible crowd? What a weird concept. If it’s on TV, you can see that the stadium is empty and all the noise has to have the sincerity of canned laughter. Watching in fast-forward retained the flow of the game but did away with the annoying background noise.
    The verdict? Could have gone either way if it hadn’t been ruined by the ref sending off one of the Chelski players after a nothing foul, which certainly did not merit a yellow card. Two-one to Arsenal final, ruined by the chump of a ref.

Dead giveaway

If you see a word-puzzle clue that refers to Thomas, and you start thinking about tank engines rather than doubters (as the puzzle compiler expects you to), does that say something really telling about you?

Clothears yet again

I heard a TV ad for what sounded like Covid/PC World the other day. That sounds like a firm guaranteed to inspire lots of confidence!
    There’s also a guide dogs ad which offers what sounds like ‘weekly women’. I hesitate to speculate about what they could be in case I’m trolled by people who opt to be a woman once a week. And I’d probably be in a lot more trouble if I decide it’s really ‘weakly women’!

The dead hand of local government

One of my mates has just had a communication from the local council about the electoral register. There’s only him listed on the piece of paper but it’s addressed to ‘The Occupier’. Like they don’t know who’s paying all the council tax for the privilege of living there.