Posts tagged with "rant"
Friday, February 15, 2013 11:04:56 PM
beef, cow, meat, pig
...
"You mean that wasn't a pig?"
I love how the horsemeat-in-the-cow and pig-meat-in-the-kebab thingie started as just an unfortunate problem with cross contamination (Someone didn't clean the equipment properly? That's reassuring), to 'this is a criminal operation but be reassured there is no health risk', and onwards to 'this is several criminal operations and there is a very slight health risk'.
Somebody somewhere would be well advised not to open their mouths until the information has reached their brain.
I wonder if that's it or is it going to turn into a North Korean plot to destabilise our economy conducted by the Russian Mafia fronted by Putin...
...And there is a giant health risk, only vegetarians will survive.
Hit me with those lentils, waiter!
Sunday, February 3, 2013 10:42:19 PM
Money, humour, Brown, Liberal
...
You know how it is, you post an innocent opinion or comment on a website and someone thinks they should have a word or two with you about it, then someone else joins in to either defend you or point out where else you've gone wrong, and if you have any sense you never visit the website again and stay well out of it, but...
Yup, nowadays the website will keep writing to you to say that someone has commented on your post, or joined the discussion, or even glanced in the general direction of a computer that would display your original post if he or she should care to look for it, and the email provider
always displays just enough of the message for you to think "By George, I must put this person straight immediately!", and there you are. In a discussion, and desperately trying to avoid it turning into an argument.
So, I got involved in a discussion...
And it was in the course of this discussion that someone opined that they could guess what my opinions on everything would be because I was a typical lefty labour party supporting woolly-hearted socialist. It was the "Hearted" bit that struck me, thus rendering me unable to forget the conversation. Did the poster really mean "Hearted", or did they really mean "Headed"?
I thought I should be told.
Alas I may never get an answer to that particular question as several people joined in predicting my opinions on everything. Some of them surprised me. I will happily admit that, all things being equal, you'll find me supporting the person, animal, insect, germ, plant, or inanimate object at the bottom of the pile, and if that makes me in anyway woolly, then woolly I shall be. Unfortunately my correspondents had run into my right-wing side.
One of them used the word "Virtually". Ooh, that's sooo annoying, 'virtually' is an underdog word.
'Virtually' started it's life as a superlative of 'absolutely', and 'absolutely' is a word which needs no superlative. Who needs a word meaning 'absolutely absolutely'? 'Absolutely' itself only survives by the skin of its teeth because it has other uses, albeit there are other words that duplicate those other uses (Like 'yes'), 'virtually' only survives because its mini-me and minimini-me, 'virtual' and 'virtue' do have their values.
So what has happened to poor old 'virtually'? Well it got caught up in biznis-speak. People were heard to say silly things like "This hospital is virtually germ-free", meaning "This hospital is absolutely absolutely germ free", or in other words "This hospital has not one germ on its floor space, not one crack or crevice has escaped our attention, you could crawl through our sewers and drink the water. All mice, cockroaches, rats and other vermin have been exterminated and their fleas vaporised, no bird will attempt to land upon our roof for fear of our thermo-nuclear deterrent, and we have guards on all doors lest any germ should attempt to sneak in disguised as a patient".
The problem being that we all knew it was a lie, firstly because we can only be sure we've killed all known germs
and secondly because we know that those concerned in the interview are themselves walking germ hootenannies, and thus poor old 'virtually' was devalued into a management alternative to 'almost'. Nowadays virtually everyone uses it in that context.
Tell me you don't feel a bit sorry for it.
Friday, January 18, 2013 11:45:39 PM
seminal frond, weather, Weirdness, life
...
For years now I've been complaining that someone in the area of my home has an electronic key which unlocks my mother's car, only to be greeted with the opinion that I had probably forgotten to lock it because the odds on anyone having a duplication of our key is ginormous in the extreme.
Yesterday I drove into the car park of a little café and went in for for a drink and a nibble. When I came out a small fairly recent car had parked alongside us. I clicked the magic button and unlocked the car next to us.
OK, so I've proved it's possible, but what now? Surely I should now lock the little car again? Nope, I couldn't. I locked the other car and I locked ours, I unlocked ours and... You get the story.
Someone sensible and nice would have driven their car some distance away then walked back and locked the other car, but it had started snowing and I got a bit of a skid going on the way across the car park, and... well, I forgot.
Somewhere there's a driver out there trying to convince a disbelieving world that they had locked their car, and someone else must have unlocked it.
They have my apologies, and my sympathy.
Wednesday, July 25, 2012 9:35:21 AM
seminal frond, thinking, stupidity, joined up
...
I used to cringe every time someone said that in my presence. Be it a line manager or a managing director, my reaction was always the same.
"Is there any other kind?"
If you were to approach a total stranger and ask "What are you thinking?" and they replied "Squid", would you be satisfied with that, or would you press on and ask "Aha, yes but are you thinking of the plight of the Giant Squid, the word's largest invertebrate, or mayhap the episode of the online comic 'The Anthronauts' entitled 'Plight of the squid', or perhaps you are thinking of a fond pet, or an exotic meal, or do you think only of a Cockneyesque slang term for money?" would you be prepared to accept the reply "I don't know, I haven't got that far yet"?
This is a subject which seems to feature a lot in my blogiary and here we go again.
Yesterday, while we were out, someone snuck down our road putting up notices to say that there would be no onstreet parking today because they would be doing road resurfacing work.
I noticed the problem immediately. Today is the day of the refuse disposal operative. No one could be that stupid, can they?
Yes, they can.
There are men with big lorries out there struggling to resurface the road whilst others struggle to empty our recycling into their big lorries around them.
What we need is joined up thinking.
Sunday, July 8, 2012 7:31:30 PM
Money, Liberal, rock'n'roll, rant
...
Judge-led enquiries? Please, pause whilst I scoff. Who needs judges when we have MPs?
There'll be Conservatives asking questions, they'll be the ones who are always bearing in mind that the banks fund 55% of their party. There'll be Labourites in full probe mode, always remembering in the back of their minds that these are the b@$#@£ds who sabotaged them right before an election. There will probably also be the odd Liberal or two trying to be incisive without upsetting anyone and always carrying the nagging knowledge that these are the guys who never gave them any money. And finally there may be a real minority candidate if they can find one, who will feel that they have something to prove and nothing to lose, and who will in any any case firmly believe that all bankers should be shot.
I can hardly wait.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________
Not that judges would be any kind of guarantee of quality. For example, Crown v Levitt. Levitt was a 'businessman' arrested by the serious fraud office on charges of deception amounting to £65m. It also cost almost one and a half million quid to bring him to trial. Levitt cunningly agreed to plead guilty on a "Specimen charge", and was sentenced to, wait for it, 180 hours community service.
Two thugs, in an unprovoked attack, beat a young man senseless with an iron bar. For reasons known only to himself the judge decided not to send them to jail, the boy's father then swore at the judge and hit one of the men. The judge immediately sentenced the father to 3 months in prison. He might have gone harder on him were it not for the fact that he had less than a year to live due to terminal cancer.
The former owner of Walsall Football Club was found guilty of fraudulently acquiring £90m of the money investors had put into his company. The judge decided against prison because he said he'd received "Moving" letters from the man's friends and colleagues.
Ernest Saunders, former head of the Guinness liquid refreshment empire, was found guilty of theft, conspiracy, and false accounting. The trial set we-the-people back to the tune of £20m, in return for which we got him put away for two and a half years. Except that after 10 months he was released on the grounds of 'pre-senile dementia'. He suffered an instant recovery, trousered £150,000 tax-free from Guinness and jetted off to work as a consultant in Switzerland.
Roger Seelig, also a part of the Guinness scandal, didn't wait that long to get taken not well. We-the-people funded his defence, to the tune of $400,000. The judge then abandoned the trial because Seelig was apparently "Bewildered" and "Unable to think straight". So bewildered was he that he promptly landed a job as director of Norman Hay Ltd.
It's amazing what you pick up if you watch Have I Got News For You for long enough.
Saturday, June 23, 2012 2:01:25 AM
Barlow, carr, take that, jimmy
...
Jimmy Carr has said sorry and pulled out of the tax-avoidance scheme. It seems he looked at the people who were supporting him and decided he didn't want to be associated with people like that.
Sensible man.
That just leaves Take That.
Actually it doesn't, apparently it's only Gary who's stashing his dosh out of sight of the taxman, Robbie's still paying up and sees no reason not to. I always said he was awright...
The funny thing is, although PM Cameron had a right go at Carr, he's not said a word about Barlow. I don't understand it.
Yes I do. Gary Barlow is a donor to the Conservative party.
See? They tell you that political donors don't do it to buy favours, but they're lying. They're politicians. I rest my case.
Thursday, April 19, 2012 12:47:26 AM
humour, politics, stupidity, Weirdness
...
You can tell that researchers are running out of things to research, fast. In Australia they researched into the relationship between types of people and the way they vote. They came to the conclusion that the bigger, stronger, and/or aggressive you are, the more likely you are to vote for the right wing.
Although they seem to have baulked at saying it, the obvious conclusion is that the more weedy, vertically challenged, and generally nerdy you are, the more likely you are to vote for the left wing.
They did sweeten the pill a little by pointing out that intelligent people were more likely to vote left, but that may say more about the researchers than anything else. If you were a researcher would you deliberately issue a paper which suggested that you were an idiot? Who'd read it? If you write "By the way, I'm an idiot" on your thesis I can pretty much guarantee it will cost you points.
At least I now know which way I should be voting, and indeed why bankers give so much money to the Conservative party.
Meanwhile, with our medical records soon to go online, and our police and employment records already online, it should soon be possible to cross reference our details and predict how we are most likely to vote, without the need for us to actually do so.
Isn't progress wonderful?
Sunday, April 15, 2012 1:00:07 AM
paypal, Money, politics, avoidance
...
There's going to be a steady flow of internet hackers leaving the UK shores bound for the USA after the EU courts decided that although their crimes took place in Britain, the servers upon which they were committed were in the US.
Using this same logic, companies like Amazon, Ebay, and Paypal are getting away with paying no tax on their UK sales.
Is it really more important that a few hackers get tried abroad than that we recuperate all that money the exchequer is losing?
I think we should be told.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012 12:21:13 AM
internet, advertising, privacy, rant
...
I'm starting to worry about this 'net privacy thing. A few personal details on Facebook and suddenly I'm getting ads on my Googlemail for girls who are definitely under half my age, live almost next door, and want a date. At least on Facebook itself they seem to have some idea of my age, there's a girl with enormous boobies from 'Dating50s' looking at me very strangely even as I type... Ooh, and there's an ad for 'PC knowledge for seniors'. Listen you condescending jerks, I've probably forgotten more about computers than you'll ever know.
I think I preferred it when they thought I was a 17 year old from Brighton (No, I have no idea where they got that from either...).
Time for my medicine.
Angry Old Git - Welshpool.
Wednesday, February 8, 2012 10:00:52 PM
express, daily, Weirdness, mail
...
There's this website, it analyses statistics and proves that immigration is A Bad Thing. This kind of thing (For illustrative purposes only)...
The population of the Earth is increasing.
Wildfires are increasing.
Therefore populution causes wildfires.
Conclusion: We don't want any more of those populationists and their wildfires over here.
The government decided it was time to hit back and discredit these pesky anti-cheap-labourforce types once and for all, enter... thementhatknowstuff, who promptly declare that the figures prove that immigration has no effect upon employment whatsoever at all at all at all.
Now, quite frankly, if immigration has no effect on employment then they must be living on welfare. Send for the Daily Mail, I wanna join! Hey, while I'm in the mood I'll subscribe to the Express too.
I only say that because I happen to know that immigrants do work. I know because the Mail and Express say they do. They come over here and steal our jobs you see. Masquerading as cleaners, plumbers, carpenters, and refuse disposal officers they sneak in through the back door and get jobs.
Swine.
But, to get back to the whole point, of course immigration has an effect upon employment. It may have no effect upon unemployment if they're all taking jobs that no one over here wants to do, but if they're working then they are having an effect upon employment. A positive effect, but an effect nonetheless.
Talk your way out of that one you statisticians.
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