A Slick Protest

There were protests last week at the Tate (a British art gallery). A group calling itself  "Liberate Tate" poured an "oil like" substance over each other in a protest against BP's sponsorship of the Tate. Members feel that after the oil spill that covered much of the coastline of the southern states and buggered up the both the local ecology and local economy, it is wrong for BP to give money to worthy causes. It would appear that "Liberate Tate" members feel that BP shareholders have suffered enough, and rather than waste their money on art galleries, BP should keep the money to give to their shareholders - to help them maintain their luxury yachts and keep their penthouses fully staffed with maids, butlers, etc.

Cuba-ism

Raul Castro, the new(ish) first secretary of Cuba, said this week that he wanted to impose a limit on the length of time officials could stay in power in the country. He favours a limit of "two terms in office" similar to the limit placed on the US president. He also announced the appointment of several new officials - Jose Ventura (age 80) and Ramiro Valdes (age 78). Raul Castro is himself 79 years old. So it begs the question, what is the point in limiting the time these officials are allowed to stay in office? None of them have much hope of staying alive long enough to go over the two term limit!

Royal Wedding Sleepover

There has been a lot of wittering in the press about the Middleton's social standing. Some journalists don't think Catherine Middleton is "royal" enough to be a future queen. The hotel the family will be staying in during the wedding has just invested £160,000 in eight new beds for them (that is £20,000 per bed!) plus a further £150,000 on a "makeover" for the suite in which they will be staying. On the "princess and the pea" system (the idea that royalty find it impossible to sleep in anything but perfect luxury - even a single dried pea under the mattress will make it impossible for a princess to sleep) I think this proves the "royal" credentials of the family.

By contrast I can happily sleep on the floor. That puts my "royal" credentials so low that I doubt if I even qualify to become one of the Queen's corgis!

The First Kiss Of Spring

Yesterday the European press was full of 'photos of Silvio Berlusconi (the Italian prime minister) kissing Letizia Moratti (the mayor of Milan). She looked delighted and surprised. The surprise is probably because she realised she is not his type, after all, she is old enough to be legal.

Late Breaking News

In 2003 Rebekah Brooks, the editor of the News of the World, said that journalists "had paid police for information in the past". This is a criminal offence (both for the journalists and the police officers who took the money). Yesterday assistant police Commissioner Cressida Dick said that they planned "to conduct a scoping exercise to establish whether there are now any grounds for beginning a criminal investigation".

It is nice to know that our police spring into action so quickly!

Foreign Bodies

After David Cameron's speech on immigration and foreign workers in Britain, Nick Griffin (leader of the BNP) was on the radio yesterday complaining that Cameron had stolen his policies. Perhaps that was what Cameron was talking about on those pre-election TV debates when he kept saying "I agree with Nick."

It's Golf Jim, But Not As We Know It

Golf is trying to make itself more interesting (in the same way cricket did, with 20-20 cricket). The official idea involves having two pins (whatever that means - I don't play the game) and only using 9 holes.

As I have already told you, I don't play golf, but I do feel that they don't need to introduce new ideas to make the game more exciting, there is already a more exciting version, they merely need to scale it up. Imagine, a full size golf course where you have to get the ball through a full size windmill......

Voss is going on?

Tyler Winklevoss and Cameron Winklevoss have just lost an appeal against their settlement with Facebook. They claimed that the previous settlement did not give them enough money. That settlement was for $20m in cash and $45m worth of stock. Since the stock is saleable, this gives them $65m, or $32.5m. I can see their point. Who can survive on $32.5m? They are young men, so that could be just half a million a year, each. Or $1.3 thousand a day. Who can live on a mere $1.3 thousand a day? It is practically minimum wage!

Girlfriends, Wives, and Slappers

According to recent research 22% of young women in Britain would like to "sleep" with a footballer to achieve fame, and 64% of them say that they would get the fame (and a shed load of money) by selling their story to the press. This means that over 14% of young women in Britain want to "sleep" with a footballer so that they can sell their story to the press!

Bad news ladies, after it finishes paying compensation and legal fees over the 'phone hacking scandal. it is unlikely that the News Of The World will have enough cash left to buy any kind of story for a while and (as mentioned last week) Sport newspapers have gone out of business!

Fish Who Need Ovaltine

Marine researchers studying cave fish have discovered that the fish do not sleep as well as other fish. They "Sleep briefly, and when awake, remain awake for a long time."

If you could speak "fish", I'm sure the cave fish would tell you that they usually sleep normally, but keep getting woken up by all these bloody marine researchers swimming round their cave and staring at them!

Human Cows

Gene manipulation scientists have come up with a cow that produces human milk. They are still testing it to ensure it is safe for humans to drink, but when testing is finished it will be used to feed babies as an alternative to breast milk. An interesting idea, but I think that they are missing another brilliant use for a cow that gives human milk:

You read all sorts of legends about children being raised by wolves, and stories about kids brought up by monkeys, but that is all they are - legends and stories. So how about children really being raised by cows. Now they can produce human milk, they could take over the whole job and rear the little rug rats. That frees up us humans to do other things - like having fun. The kid gets to have a cool mum called Daisy or Ermentrude. And think how cool it would be to have a bull as a dad. An instant winner in playground oneupmanship:

"My dad can beat your dad"

"Well my dad can gouge your dad. He'll rip his stomach open with his horns then trample him to death with his hooves."

Cool.

Going Postal

Postage in Britain went up again this week, a lot of people are moaning about this, and pointing out that postal charges are going up at a rate of over twice that of inflation. However what most people forget is all the additional costs that the Post Office has to contend with, costs that other businesses do not have to worry about. For example:

CLOSING POST OFFICES Shutting down large quantities of post offices is not cheap, specially in rural areas where they are especially necessary. And it is not just the physical cost of shutting down the post office, there is the cost of making people redundant, particularly at a time of high unemployment when jobs are needed - this costs money.

LOOSING LETTERS Do you think your letters loose themselves? Of course not! Large quantities of incompetent staff have to be employed to miss-deliver, misplace, or simply dump a percentage of the post. And all these people have to be paid.

THEFT Don't forget the dishonest employees they have to deal with. Failing to perform proper checks when hiring people and refusing to check staff for stolen post is not free.

NOT BEING PREPARED FOR WINTER Winter comes round every year in Britain, and with it comes snow and ice. We all know this, we all prepare for it, but the Post Office has to spend money carefully ignoring this fact. They have to employ staff to ensure that they are not prepared for winter, staff who will be genuinely surprised when it gets a bit cold around November. This is the only way to make sure that none of their delivery vans are equipped for ice or snow. People this stupid are hard to find, not only do you have to spend a lot of money recruiting them, you also have to pay them a high salary to prevent them from being "head hunted" by the railway companies, airports, etc.

So before you start complaining about having to pay 46p just to send a single letter a few miles across the country, think about the high cost of incompetence at the Post Office. Stupidity and a general inability to do your job is not cheap. And you will have to pay for this if you want the Post Office to continue to offer the same level bad service that we have come to expect from them.

Obituary

Today I learnt of the sad demise of two stalwart British newspapers. On Friday both the Daily Sport and the Sunday Sport ceased publication. The main reason for their downturn in sales was quoted as competition from the Internet. It kind of sums up the quality of those two papers that it was not "free news websites" that did for them, but "free porn websites". However I can remember buying the first ever issue of the paper all those years back (a quarter of a century ago), so, in memory of Sport Newspapers here is an obituary in the style of their own reporting, containing all the facts as they would have seen them (and for those who have never read the paper, yes this is the sort of story you got in those newspapers, usually illustrated with a photo of a topless woman).

NO NEWS IS NOT GOOD NEWS

Adolph Hitler was found alive and well today, living on the North Pole with a teenage nymphomaniac Eskimo. For the past twenty five years he had been producing two national newspapers (the Daily Sport and the Sunday Sport) from his secret base, using a hidden printing works on the moon. He used the profits from his publishing empire to fund a hedonistic lifestyle sailing around the Caribbean in his luxury yacht with a crew of naked teenage girls with whom he performed sexual acts too disgusting and perverse to describe here.

This all came to an abrupt end when aliens abducted Adolph Hitler and used a bazaar alien death ray to turn his teenage nymphomaniac Eskimo girlfriend into a chocolate muffin. Hitler was then taken up into the spaceship where he was probed anally before being forced by the aliens to perform sexual acts too disgusting and perverse to describe here.

Sport Newspapers LTD was left in ruins. No issues of the Daily Sport or the Sunday Sport have been published since Adolf Hitler's abduction by sex mad aliens. His employees at his printing works remain stranded on the moon where they have nothing to do but indulge in a non stop orgy of perverted sex where they spend all day performing sexual acts too disgusting and perverse to describe here.

Hitler has now released a DVD showing all the intimate and disgusting sexual activities he gets up to with the aliens. It is a two hour DVD of the most extreme sex you have ever seen. This DVD is so obscene that it should be be banned everywhere and all copies destroyed. To see for yourself how disgusting and perverse this DVD is, send £19.99 (plus £2.99 postage and packing) for your copy, to Sport Newspapers LTD at our usual address.

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In Remembrance of these fine newspapers I have put together a tribute DVD, and I am giving away FREE copies to everyone. In the spirit of so many similar Daily Sport and Sunday Sport offers, you can get your copy of this FREE DVD absolutely FREE, just send me your name and address and a cheque for £24.99 to cover postage and packing, and I'll send you a copy totally FREE.

The DVD contains a moving tribute to both newspapers, read our by a selection of topless teenage nymphomaniac girls, and also contains UNCENSORED footage of the lesbian orgy that followed the filming of the tributes, where the girls all perform sexual acts too disgusting and perverse to describe here.

The book's price, or the Price's book

In response to reports that her popularity is waning, Katie Price (AKA Jordan) drew attention to the continued high sales of her book. No Katie, this does not show that you are still popular, this shows that whoever wrote the book for you is still popular!

Whoops!

Fun for Southwest Airlines passengers during a flight when there was a loud bang then a hole opened up in the roof of the aircraft. The FBI told people not to worry as "terrorism was not suspected, it appears to be a mechanical issue". Oh goody- we are not being bombed, the aeroplane is just falling apart under us!

According to the airline, this is not a major problem (!) they have about a hundred aeroplanes of this type (Boeing 737) and only one other has suffered an incident like this before. This means that you have a 98% chance of flying in a safe aeroplane........And a 2% chance of the aeroplane disintegrating in mid air!

The investigation is not yet complete, but the most likely cause was metal fatigue. I looked up the physics on this, all metals are tested for tolerance (I.E. to work out the "shelf life" of the aeroplane and ensure it is taken out of commission long before it is likely to fall apart in mid air). The calculations involve a formula called "The Palmgren-Miner Linear Damage Rule", which is long, complicated, and involves what looks like a differential equation (I avoid anything that even looks like a differential equation on the grounds that, many years ago, I failed an interview for a scholarship to Dulwich College because I did not manage to resolve a differential equation that they set for me). The equation includes a constant that (and here I am quoting) "...is experimentally found to be between 0.7 and 2.2. Usually for design purposes, it is assumed to be 1." Or in other words "It could be anything between 0.7 and 2.2, but when we design aircrafts we guess an it being 1." And they wonder why the fucking things fall apart in mid air!!!!

From now on I don't think I'll go anywhere that is so far away that I cannot get there by bus.

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From the BBC report:

'The National Transportation Safety Board said an "in-flight fuselage rupture" led to the sudden descent and drop in cabin pressure. "We do not know the cause of the decompression" Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Ian Gregor said.'

Just a slight hint Ian: I don't know much about the physics of flying (I never got that scholarship, remember) but I would guess that the "cause of the decompression" probably has something to do with the sodding great hole that opened up in the roof!

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On a side note, it was reported that no passengers were hurt, but "a couple of people aboard nearly passed out while trying to put on oxygen masks." Putting on an oxygen mask simply involves holding the damn thing in front of your mouth. If you are still having problems doing that, perhaps you want to consider the possibility that you have not yet reached the stage in evolution where you are capable of being a passenger on an aeroplane!

The President's Umbrella

Nicolas Sarkozy, the president of France, has been issued with a Kevlar coated umbrella. It is described as a "bullet proof umbrella", but apparently it won't stop bullets. So that's an "umbrella" then!

Bad Timing By Me

Yesterday, having just decided to start this blog, I was sitting on the train reading the Metro (a free newspaper) and I came across an article suggesting that journalists who hack into MP's telephone messages could be prosecuted for "contempt of Parliament". I was not even aware that "contempt of Parliament" was a crime, and just before starting this blog was a bad time to find out. With the plans I have for future posts, I could find myself spending a lot of time in court, charged with showing contempt of Parliament!!!