Boss Radio

We pulled in at a farm that did snacks and sold ice-cream. They had a couple of newspapers available for customers but the only one left was The Torygraph (If you can use the word 'left' in the same sentence as the 'graph).

So here's what's in today's headlines.

Taxpayer's £500 bill. This one caused a bit of a raised eyebrow. 500 quid? We're being told that we're in deep felgercarb and yet if every taxpayer handed over 500 smackers the debt would be paid?

Don't get me wrong, if a bill arrived on my doorstep saying 'Dear taxpayer, please send us a check or postal order for £500' I'd be well annoyed, but that doesn't alter the fact that everyone earning enough to be paying tax could afford it. I was a little miffed that we'd all been misled in this way.

Naturally there was more to the story. It was £500 a year that the taxpayer was going to have to pay extra in order to pay back what we now owe. Not so good, but not so bad either since obviously those on my wages would be paying back proportionately less of the 500 than those on wankerbankers wages. Not really headline grabbing stuff really I thought.

Grand National winner's mother bets 50p. They actually missed the apostrophe, but I couldn't bring myself to do a sic on them. The big story here was that the rank outsider ridden by a total newcomer that won the Grand National (It's a horse race if there's any of you don't know about all this local stuff...) was not entirely unbacked. The jockey's mum bet on him, but she didn't think he stood a snowflake in Hades chance of winning, so she only bet half a pound, 50% of a quid, five-zero pee. So after her son came riding home in tremendous style leaving all the opposition to eat his dust, his mum was able to collect just £50 for them to celebrate with. Amusing, but not my idea of a headline grabber.

Postmen face rubber band fines. Long time readers will recall I have addressed this topic before. I no longer buy rubber bands, if I want one I go outside and pick a few up from the pavement. It seems that some spoilsports think of this rubber band dropping as litter, and want intransigent postmen to be fined accordingly.

Sorry, still not a real attention grabber along the lines of 'Freddy Starr ate my hampster' or 'Phew! What a scorcher'.

Council staff earn over £100,000. According to this story over a thousand council staff have salaries with six figures before the decimal dot. Considering how many councils there are that doesn't seem like that many to me, not compared with the number of execs in private industry earning 7 figure salaries.

The article follows the usual pattern of 'shock horror while the private industries are having to cut back on employees (Not the boss's remunerations you notice) over 1,000 employees in the public sector are earning (etc.)'. This might concern me more if during the good times there'd been articles about how much the private sector were being paid compared to their opposite numbers in the public domain, but since there were none I'm afraid I can't get excited about this either. Another none attention grabber.

So that's it. Must've been a bad news day for that little lot to have made the front page.

Oh wait...

What's this little column here?

'Obama calls for a nuclear weapon free future'.

Good to see they've still got their fingers on the public pulse.

I couldn't believe it, there I was, listening to the news, and suddenly the newsreader says "Let's not forget that every silver lining has a cloud". Am I seriously expected to believe that he hadn't just read yesterday's blog and stolen my joke? Pah! What're the odds?

He was interviewing some poor happless minister who was trying to explain that, contrary to popular opinion, crime was going down. Well, I say "Popular opinion", the truth is that according to recent surveys that covered this particular scenario, readers of tabloid newspapers are far more inclined to believe that crime is on the increase than those who read the grown up press, or who don't rely upon the papers for their opinionsnews at all.

I don't know if this is a reflection upon the tabloids, or upon the people who read them. All newspapers print bad news, and bad news is usually crime related, so in theory all newspaper readers should be garnering the same impressions, therefore either tabloid readers are stupid or the tabloids are over-egging the news.

Me, I'm far more interested in where the term 'over egg' originated. Note to self: Write and ask the lovely Susie on 'Countdown'. She's sure to know.

One of the more interesting items in today's news was a school complaining that too many of its pupils had passed a particular exam. It would seem that this particular establishment is very proud of it's prowess in the field covered by this exam, and was hoping for maybe even a 30% pass rate. When the result came in and they had an over 50% pass rate they knew something was wrong, but instead of keeping quiet and basking in the glory and subsequent lack of attention from government watchdogs these results would bring they became incensed. What is the point, they wanted to know, of passing an exam and getting a piece of paper to prove it, if people who hadn't really passed it also had bit of paper saying that they had?

So then, I guess the realisation that if they only got a 30% pass rate next year people might think they were letting the ball slip through their fingers, so to speak, had nothing to do with it. Well done, gentlemen, that was most British of you, and Britain is, accordingly, proud of you.

Yes it is.

Less welcome news was that my gas bill may be going up by anything up to 70% over the next 6 months. This is, so they say, because our head honchos in the field of gas supply didn't invest in gas while the prices were low and now everyone else has snapped up the cheap gas and we're left with the expensive stuff. What I don't get is why that means my bills are going up. The companies screwed up, let them pay the extra.

It doesn't work that way, you say? I think it simply doesn't work. Period. The idiot Thatcher sold our utilities to the private sector because she believed that they would give us the best deal. Instead they sold all our newly discovered natural gas overseas because the government's overseers (If Thatcher thought the private sector would give us the best deal, why did she think they needed overseers? I think we should be told.) had made sure we were paying only a fair price, and those sneaky guys from faraway places were willing to pay a little more than we were paying. The net result of this is that our gas (And oil) fields, which should have lasted another 10-20 years, are now running out. Now stripe me pink if I'm being stupid here, but I don't think the nationalised utilities would have done that, just as I don't believe that they would have put all their eggs in one basket (There's those eggs again...) and built only gas powered electricity generating sites. Yup. That's right. If gas goes up, so does electricity...

Another item in the news said that when Thatcher dies she will have a state funeral.

It'll be nothing compared to the state she'd be in if I had a rocket launcher.

I couldn't help but notice that today's papers, with just one exeption that I could see, have all gone with the story that Gordon Brown visited Iraq yesterday just to detract attention from the Tory party conference.

Now I'll be the first to admit that I didn't read every word of every paper, but I did read all that was on the front page of most of them. After all, if they have evidence that Brown did do the very thing that he said he wasn't going to do, then it should be right there under the headline, right?

There was none. All of them had published an opinion as a fact. Time was that opinions went into the opinion column, now it masquerades as news.

Now I, just like the papers, have no idea if Brown commited the crime or if he simply went to Iraq because he is due to be answering questions on the subject in the house next week and he hasn't even been there yet. These visits are always kept secret, and I would suspect that Brown has little say in exactly when he can go once he's decided that he wants to, if he did then surely he'd have gone during Cameron's speech today rather than the boring stuff that was being discussed yesterday? It seems to me that there's just as much evidence one way as the other, but if opinion is now news then can I be the first to accuse Julie Burchill of sleeping with the editor (Or more likely promising not to sleep with the editor...) to get her column? How else would someone so lacking in talent have landed a sinecure like that? I reckon she's probably a terrorist as well, there's a veritable smorgasbord of evidence attesting to that in her old NME columns.

And what about the dirty digger himself? Rupert Murdoch. Who'd have thought that he was one of the great train robbers?

Well he sure looks like one to me.