last additions 2007/08/11

• The Daily Mail always wants customers to collect vast numbers of tokens to take advantage of its offers. But for some of them, anyone can go to one of their websites and get the offer without tokens just by paying with a credit card. Which makes rather a nonsense of the whole token thing.
• May 2007 : British Gas is currently running a scam. This is how it works:
     • BG last read our meter at the beginning of February, 2007 before they sent out a bill.
     • They didn't read the meter before sending out an estimated bill in May.
     • The bill OVERESTIMATED our gas consumption, which is particularly bad for the beginning of the year, when the price was higher.
     • BG has OVERCHARGED us for the amount of gas consumed and any balancing up between actual and estimated consumption will not be made until after the next meter reading - conveniently for BG, when the gas price is lower than at the beginning of the year.
• Recycling paper is a bad idea. If paper is consigned to a landfill site after use, its carbon content is taken out of circulation. Growing trees to make new paper takes carbon dioxide out of the environment. So replacing (dumped not burnt) used paper instead of recycling it makes a positive contribution to reducing global warming.
• Now that the British army, which tried to treat the Iraqis decently, has been reduced in status from liberator to reviled occupying power, the time has come to announce a firm, and short timetable for withdrawal during 2006. And the Iraqis must be made to realize that if they don't shape up, they'll be left to sort out their own mess.
• What went wrong with the Poll Tax, with which Tony Blair thinks he can beat Michael Howard, is that left-wing scroungers felt that they should be entitled not to pay their share, and Labour councils, especially in Scotland, chose not to collect what the scroungers owed. So honest people were forced to pay their own share plus the shares of the lefty scroungers plus the extra administration costs piled up by the political posturing of Labour councils.
• The night of 18/19th November had a hard frost in Romiley. On Friday morning, I broke the ice on the 'bird bath' (a plastic seed tray which is very popular with the local blackbirds) to find out how thick the ice was (1/4 inch). To my surprise, the underside of the ice wasn't smooth - it was covered with feathers of ice.
  The 'feathers' were about an inch long and projecting from the surface at a shallow angle (20 degrees or so). Each 'feather' was the same width (about 1/8th inch) along its length to the rounded tip. The 'feathers' looked like miniature saw blades consisting of a sequence of large (compared to the width of the feather) flat teeth mounted edge to edge along both sides of a central spine.
  Has anyone else ever seen anything like this? Because I certainly haven't!
  A RLC member.
• Adding MinSPs=16 to the [386 Enh] of the system.ini file can be helpful when Windows 98 jams up solid instead of shutting down. The default minimum setting for Stack Pages is 2 but giving the system more of them is usually a good idea. The value specified must be a multiple of 4.
• The government's advertising budget was £40million in 1997, before Mr. B. Liar and New Labour came along. This figure soared to around £140 million in the year before the last general election, then it dropped off. And guess what? With another general election in the offing, the advertising budget is going through the roof again.
• Do junk mailers use flags of convenience?
  What's the first target of the junkmailer? To get the punter to open the envelope. That has to be why HFS of Macclesfield is sending out mailings about loans with NPM, Ltd. of Derby as the return address. The punter has no idea who the mailing is from, he/she opens the envelope, and it gets a cursory inspection before being binned. A small triumph for the junk mailer, a small amount of the recipient's time wasted. Such is life.
• Two-thirds of Americans are overweight or clinically obese; the average American consumes 34 teaspoons of sugar every day; a 12-ounce can of fizzy drink, for instance, contains 10 teaspoons of sugar; the sugar industry is one of the most influential on US government policy; much of the US sugar production is based in Florida; electoral fun and games in Florida got President Dubya Bush elected. So Fat America is all his fault!
• Not yet seen in a dating column : GOSH – Good Sense Of Humour (slightly warped)
• Seen in the front display case of a Baptist church -- Body piercing can save you
• Cherie Blair & her Aussie con-man : not so much economical with the truth as downright niggardly!
• The dustmen don't take our dust far enough -- it keeps finding its way back into our house.
• The A-Level pass rate is expected to reach 100% in 2004 if the current rate of increase is maintained. So what happens in 2005? Will some random distribution of the excess take place? Will people wake up one morning and find that they suddenly have a qualification even though they haven't taken the exam?
     How are we going to get our heads around the fact that more people passed an exam than the number of people sitting it? Get your spin doctors on that, Tony Blair!
• The question of putting a statue of the Queen Mum in Trafalgar Square has many sides. If it is to be done, would she be represented as a 100-year-old, old lady? Or as the last Empress of India in appropriate finery? And what about the sight of pigeons grotting all over the statue - is that something which would offend royalists while gladdening the hearts of republicans?
     Perhaps the solution to the Trafalgar Square issue would be to leave the 4th plinth empty as a sign that there are no great men and women any more and give a statue of the Queen Mum a home in an appropriate public building, to which pigeons and republicans have no access.
• Phase Watch : The Observer magazine, page 6, 2002/01/27 "not being phased by hard work." The death of faze continues.
• It's a Disgrace 1. that the Freud person made Her Majesty's eyes point in different directions in the ghastly daub which was passed off as a "portrait".
  2. That Asterix the Gaul is being used to advertise McD*n*lds.
• The Tail Wagging The Dog Award for 19/11/01 goes to the Daily Mail, which printed a snivelling apology to its Moslem readers for offending them by including a picture of the prophet Mohammed with an article about him the previous Saturday. Writing an article about someone doesn't turn that page of the paper into a diplomatic enclave, Daily Mail. And why weren't you apologizing for the rest of the paper as Islamic rules don't allow the use of any pictures of people and animals? Mind you, applying a 'no pictures' rule might be a good idea the next time the editor gets an urge to do another Princess Di non-story!
• The 'ph-word' strikes back! It has long been the custom to spell faze [US origin, to discompose] with an 'f'. It has long been the custom of certain RLC authors to start the notorious 'f-word' with 'ph' to reduce its impact on the printed page yet preserve the impact on thorough readers.
  Now [November, 2001], the cult of the 'ph' has taken faze into its custody. Bright young things writing for the national newspapers, and crusty sub-editors, now favour 'phase'. Is it the influence of Star Trek and its phasers? Very possibly.
• The 16-year-old girl who zapped Prince Chas with a bunch of flowers clearly needs locking up - but where? In the Iosef Stalin Political Re-Education Camp until she learns that Latvia is not under threat from the UK? Or in the Max Clifford Memorial Moral Re-education Camp until she learns that self-publicists who whack Class One people with carnations are utterly naff? You choose.
• So the CIA has been given permission to kill Osama bin Laden? Let's hope they do a better job than they did on Fidel Castro!
• Those who have read Eric Frank Russell's Wasp [included on the books page of Mr. Wydey's website] will see parallels with people posting small packets of white powder in the United States and causing chaos via anthrax scares.
• 13/10/2001 - The 'serious' papers were going on about an anthrax scare in New York but the Daily Mail's front page was all about Shaun Russell and his new love. Nice to know there's nothing urgent going on in the world.
• How does any security force spot an Islamic terrorist on a suicide mission? Count the underpants! If the suspect is wearing more than 3 pairs, bust him.
• Amazing, the consequences of something that happens half way round the world. As a result of the terrorist attacks in the USA on 11th September, women in the Islamic state of Afghanistan are now required to unveil themselves as a means of checking that they are not heavily disguised female journalists from the West. Or even Western storm troopers looking for bad guys.
• Funny how Irish terrorism and the people in the United States who raise funds for the IRA don't count in our current 'holy war' against global terrorism.
• How do supermarkets stop motorists filling up and driving off without paying? Play them the theme tunes from TV cops shows as a subliminal reminder that they'll get arrested. Tesco seems to think this will work.
• The Guardian seems to be sliding into a deeper hole, as this section from a recent readers' survey illustrates. On objectivity, the main conclusion was: "In an increasing number of areas, the paper is incapable of objective reporting. One can gain some slight entertainment from trying to screen out the official agenda, but one needs to be fairly desperate for something to do, is how one reader put it."
  On the test that it is the job of a newspaper to report the news not its own opinions, the Grauniad seems to be failing rather badly.
• The morning TV news on 22/08/2001 - the Countryside Commission has £47 million to spend and it's looking for ideas for things to spend it on. But hasn't our dear government got things the wrong way round? Shouldn't the Mugger and his mates be requiring these quangos to come up with a plan for spending the taxpayer's cash before they chuck it about? New Labour, still Reckless Spenders.
• Ex-dictators of the world, tremble! Under the New World Pragmatism Milosevich Rule, you can be tried, humilitated and imprisoned by your enemies if they offer your country a big enough bribe in the form of aid money.
• General Election Results for 2001
  On a Proportional Representation basis, the parties get seats as follows:
  Abstention - 269;
  Labour - 164;
  Conservative - 124;
  Liberal - 72;
  Others - 26
  
• Number of people who used the Internet to look for a job in the 6 months up to May, 2001 - 5,400,000.
  Number of people who were successful - 400,000
  Success rate - 7.4%.
• God has to be a woman because no bloke could possibly be that vindictive!
• What William Hague should do is ring up Lord Taylor and tell him, "Look, if you want to join Labour, why don't you just get on with it instead of trying to manufacture an excuse for storming out of the Tory party in a bogus rage?"
• Doesn't Tony Blair look cute in his new specs! Maybe his recent haggard look is due to eye-strain and not the realization that there's an election up-coming and he's got nothing to show for the last 4 years other than a lot of spin and a bucket of sleaze.
• Isn't it great the way NASA is getting all peevish over space-tourist Dennis Tito? The space agency based in the land of the free and the home of free enterprise just can't handle the idea of an American citizen paying the cash-strapped Russians $20M to fulfil a dream. It's certainly one in the eye for the can't-do bureaucrats.
• April 2001: Robin Cook's attempt to make himself notorious - or just noticed - in the pre-election campaign by saying that there is no British race raises an interesting side issue. If Britain is too ethnically diverse for a British race to exist, then the same applies to Wales. Think of how many English people live there!
     And if the Welsh aren't a race, then Anne Robinson is entitled to a massive apology from everyone who accused her of racialism when she was nasty to them on Room 101.
     And being literal again, any fule kno that British is a nationality, not a racial grouping. But maybe a politician out to cause trouble isn't going to be bothered by something as trivial as accuracy.
• Another literal observation: members of RLC took the opportunity of clear skies to view Mir on one of its final passes over Romiley on Monday, 05/03/2001.
• 04/03/2001 - ATTENTION all those who apologized to Mandelson. Retract your apology now!
• This is an observation in an unusually literal sense, but members of RLC enjoyed viewing the International Space Station and the space shuttle Atlantis pass over Romiley on Friday, 16/02/2001 and Saturday, 17/02/2001. And then the clouds came back, which is a more usual condition for when there is something worth seeing in the skies over Romiley.
• ATTENTION all those who said that Peter Mandelson is such a greasy bastard that nothing will ever stick to him. Your apology is now overdue.
• [January, 2001] The Labour Party, which is so keen on banning fox-hunting, thinks it's okay to hunt the Loch Ness Monster. Two-faced or what!
• The government decides that people should be able to get a train to Brussels from Manchester or Stockport. The government spend over £200 million of the taxpayer's money on some new trains then leaves them to rot on sidings for years on end. Then the government sells the trains off to a Canadian company for peanuts. There are obviously subtle notes in this integrated transport strategy which go right over the head of the non-expert.
• In Romiley, the Save garage sells its fuel at 4p per litre more than the BP petrol station.
• Friday, 15th September. How can you tell that the petrol crisis is history and all's well with the world again? The Daily Mail has got Princess bloody Diana on its front page again!
• What's the difference between paraffin and petrol? There are two f's in paraffin and there's no f in petrol.
• Extra amount of our cash which the government is spending on the Millennium Dome - £47 million.
  Extra amount of our cash which the government is spending on prostate cancer research - £4 million.
• William Hague says he used to work as a labourer lugging crates of drinks around when he was a teenager. And during the course of a working day, travelling from pub to pub, he used to drink up to 10 pints of beer. And his day's consumption could be 14 pints if he went out in the evening.
  So what do the papers do? Send some idiot out on a pub crawl with no element of heavy, alcohol-burning work. And when their idiot falls over before reaching the magic 14 pints, that's supposed to prove something!
  No wonder the newspapers suffer from a permanent credibility gap if they can't be bothered comparing like with like.
• How apt it is that Tony Blair's government should spend a billion pounds of our money on a Millennium Dome which has an official closure date of 31/12/2000 - the day before the third millennnium starts!
• Sad to see the Sunday Post perpetuating a Space-Age myth in its quiz (27/8/2000). The Great Wall of China is NOT the only man-made structure visible from outer space. If you're talking about naked eye visibility, it's plenty long enough but just not wide enough to be picked out. If you're talking about using viewing instruments, well, if spy satellites can read a car number plate from orbit, then EVERY man-made structure on the surface of the planet can be seen, not just the Great Wall!
• How totally marvellous that the Aussies should have put the Colosseum on their Olympic medals [Daily Mail, 21/08/2000]. It's an old ruin from the Classical period, it's half a world away and who cares about accuracy anyway these days? Certainly not the newspapers which mocked the ignorant Aussies and yet were trying to sell us bogus millennium change souvenirs at end of last year. And when you think about it, the modern Olympic games has very little to do with the original concept - apart from being overloaded with the same sort of sleaze and corruption which put a stop to the original games, of course.
• How strangely fitting that the Chancellor who has overloaded the UK with stealth taxes should choose to marry in stealth at home as part of his stealthy plan to become leader of the Labour Party and (Oh, no! Never!) prime minister eventually.
• "How do they know that?" The same question came to mind during the BBC's Walking With Dinosaurs, when they showed an unknowable piece of animal behaviour, and also when I heard that the prosecution had accused Dr. Harold Shipman of "killing patients just for pleasure". Pity something as important as a murder trial can't be tried on the facts without the sort of embroidery that goes on in television entertainment programmes.
• Isn't it nice to know that Barclays Bank's strategy of closing all of its rural branches has paid off and the company has managed to double its profits?
• July, 2000: The premature celebrations for the Queen Mum's 100th birthday now have the flavour of Blair's Bogus, the orgy of public-money-blowing a year before the start of the third millennium. But a month early for a 100th birthday is pretty much to the same scale as being a year early for a millennium change. Perhaps it's a new rule they haven't told us about: everything starts a specific time period before it ought to, nowadays.
• Things K. Livingstone can do now he's Mayor Of London:
  1. Put traffic cones outside 10/11 Downing Street to stop T. Blair parking his car there.
  2. Give up his job as an MP and stop drawing both salaries.
  3. Issue the police with radio-controlled digital watches so they can be absolutely accurate when they tell you the time.
  4. Make possession of chewing gum an offence punishable by a £20 spot fine.
  5. Make dropping used chewing gum an offence punishable by a £50 spot fine.
  6. Oblige all politicians to use public transport within the city limits.
• Wouldn't it be a brilliant idea to get a job at an auction house, be seen on CCTV to put what everyone thinks is a boxed-up, very valuable painting in a crusher, get found out and fired long after the wreckage has been disposed of, then quietly flog the painting to a private collector when the dust dies down?
• Politicians: People who spend their years out of office boasting about how good they are, and their time in office proving what monumental liars they were.
• The railways switched from having passengers to having customers for a very good reason - they have to run trains for passengers but for customers, all they have to do is sell tickets.