I had no idea there was a World's Ugliest Dog Competition, but it turns out
there is. It looks like the Chinese Crested has the thing pretty much sewn up, I have to say.
I had also never heard of Beth Ostrosky, but it looks like one of the
Belfast Telegraph's subeditors has, and isn't too fond of her. Look at the caption on
this photo:Model and TV host Beth Ostrosky (L) kisses a Chinese Crested named Rascal
Now, that's just mean.
I'm currently reading Terry Pratchett's
Making Money because it's just out in paperback and I'm too cheap to buy hardbacks. Generally brilliant, of course — the man just keeps getting better. Well, apart from his health, of course, poor guy.
Anyway, specifically, further to his previous "gayer than a treeful of monkeys on nitrous oxide" and Achewood's superb
"straighter than John Wayne voting for Reagan on a horse" (for which, incidentally,
I am now the top Google result, which surely makes me A Man), Pratchett has now set the metaphor bar to a new high with
the girl could flounce better than a fat turkey on a trampoline.
Wow.
There's been much discussion about whether Boris Johnson was right or wrong to sack James McGrath over his alleged racism — and I must say that the
"It absolutely definitely unequivocally wasn't racist but I'd better sack him for alleged racism anyway" approach doesn't exactly send the sanest of messages. I would just like to chip in and say that this affair makes it clear that Boris Johnson is unfit for office.
Not because he was wrong to sack McGrath — though I think he was.
Not because he's a closet racist — I doubt he is, but, really, why would it even matter if he was? Let's say, for the sake of argument, that he doesn't like black people. So what's he going to do? Deport them? Lock them all up in special camps? Make it illegal to employ them? Even if he did have such private views, he's simply not in a position to make them into any sort of policy, and anyone seriously worrying about the truly terrible things that could befall black Londoners if a racist were to become Mayor is, frankly, insane.
No, it's because of the rationale for the sacking:
'We both agree that he could not stay on as my political adviser without providing ammunition for those who wish to deliberately misrepresent our clear and unambiguous opposition to any racist tendencies.'
Politics is, if nothing else, about understanding people's behaviour. Boris is correct that those who are determined to paint him as a racist would have continued to bring this up ad infinitum had McGrath stayed on his staff, but appears to be under the impression that, with him gone, they won't. This is such a fundamental and major failure to understand his political enemies that you have to wonder how he ever managed to win an election in the first place.
Yes, yes, I know: it wasn't Boris's decision,
it was David "Bloody" Cameron's. But, look, I know he's only been in the job a couple of weeks, but he should be standing up for himself — and for his office. He needs to understand that, in London, he's actually more important than Cameron, party politics be damned. He's supposed to be running one of the world's largest cities, while Cameron, on the other hand, party leader though he may be, has the far less important job of asking the Government questions on behalf of the people of just one constituency. Boris has been elected to a position of wielding power; Cameron has been elected to a position of criticising it. For Boris to obey orders from Cameron is akin to Schwarzenegger running California according to instructions from John McCain. And his failure to understand that is not a point in his defense, but merely another reason why he's not fit for the post.
But you never know. Maybe he'll figure it out.
There's
a superb piece here by Tim Worstall:It was found that at the bottom end of Primark’s supply chain were some child labourers. This was considered an outrage.
....
No, it’s not what I want for myself, not I would want for any child I know, not even what I want for Mantheesh herself: except that, of the available options that sewing is the best one there is.
Is her life going to be made better by hysterics insisting that she should have no work and thus no income? Or should we continue to do the best we can for the poor? Something which, as we all know, means buying the produce of poor people living in poor countries?
Yes, we can also do more than that, but it does seem very strange to start the process of making the world better for such children by denying them the best of the limited range of alternatives that they already have.
We know how we got to our current comfortable lifestyles, because our ancestors helpfully wrote it all down. We know how to get on top of infant mortality and have an industrial revolution and create such massive amounts of wealth that luxurious civil rights become viable and end up working puny eight-hour days and eating foreign food three nights a week in our multi-bedroomed houses. It took about two hundred years, and it took our recent ancestors a lot of bloody hard graft; it killed a lot of them. I for one am grateful to them that they worked their arses off and lived through appalling crap so that I wouldn't have to.
Now, two hundred years is a long time. Having had quite a few societies find their way down the painful road from getting up at five to milk the goat to staying up till five playing
Tomb Raider, I'd hope that by now some people out there had some decent ideas of how to get that time reduced. Maybe we could get it down to a hundred years of sweatshops — that'd be cutting it in half, which is really pretty damn good. Or maybe even fifty years, which would surely be an astounding achievement.
Instead, I notice that we as a society have decided not to tolerate even twenty minutes of some bloody foreign poor people trying to do for their descendants what our ancestors did for us. And we don't wade in and stop the hard work because we've got a new magical off-the-peg just-add-water industrial revolution for them to try out for free. No. We just wade in and stop the hard work. We replace it with absolutely nothing. And then we pat ourselves on the backs about how fucking compassionate we are.
We're pulling up the ladders 'cause we don't like the rungs. But it's really,
really nice up here.
A lot of people get very upset about the BBC's bias — although they disagree about exactly what that bias is, even after the BBC have finally sort-of admitted it. But, annoying though that is, it doesn't piss me off half as much as the sheer crapitude of their news coverage. I mean, if
this headline had appeared in one of the red-tops —
Prison had 'criminal subculture'
— we'd at least know that it was meant to be funny. From the BBC, it's just more of the dreary soulless formulaic cut-and-paste shite that typifies the "reporting" on their Website. When this happens, we know we're laughing at them, not with them.
But, at or with, on a per-laugh basis, it ain't cheap.
Even by his usual standards,
DumbJon is on superb form here:Forget all this talk of time limits, medical necessity and the like, I have the answer right here: we simply pass a law asserting that all women have the right to 'reasonable termination'.
....
Once they've dug up enough dirt, the police will carry out a series of interviews in which the suspect is asked questions like 'I notice you have "Silence of the Lambs" on DVD, do you like films with killing in them?'. Or maybe 'I've heard you used to hang out with a couple of feminists, I bet you girls had a few laughs talking about how you'd like to abort a kid, right?'.
And
a good post from Gary led me to find
this gem:Mr. Cameron told cheering supporters in Crewe that the victory was a watershed moment in Britain's march towards becoming a Russian-style plutocracy, ruled by two clans of indistinguishable, public school-educated management drones who intermittently trade power while each pushing near-identical Thatcher-lite policies.
"Today marks the beginning of the end for New Labour," he said. "Britain is tired of Labour's faceless, bureaucratic, authoritarian government, and the people are recognising the Conservatives' brand of faceless, bureaucratic authoritarianism as the way forward."
Thank you.
So we lost Eurovision again, unsurprisingly. And, apparently, this is bad news for some reason.
The Great British Public's attitude towards the Eurovision Song Contest is a thing that baffles me. Firstly, we seem to be obsessed with winning the damn thing. Why? Why are we so determined to beat those colossi of popular music, Latvia, Hungary, and [cough] France, in this one pan-European pop music contest that happens on just one day every year, when we totally wipe the floor with them and every other country in the world bar one in that other international pop music contest, called "sales", every single day, and have done for the last fifty years? All these people that, on Eurovision night, vote for the Croation entry over the British one, when they're actually in a record shop deciding what to buy with their hard-earned cash, what music they'd actually like to own so that they can listen to it again and again and again, they don't buy Croation records. They buy British. We know this. They know this. So why on Earth do we give a damn about how they vote on the one night every year when their decision costs them, and means, nothing?
However, given that, for reasons that escape me, we do give a damn, why don't we try a bit harder? When we consistently produce some of the finest popular musicians in the world, and certainly the best in Europe, why, every year, do we dredge the country for the worst amateur pap on offer? Wouldn't it be nice, one year, to see the looks on the other contestants' faces when the hosts announce "And now, with the British entry, The Rolling Stones!"?
No, I didn't watch it.
Don't worry, I'm fine. Just a bit shaken and tense and angry, but it wasn't even hard enough to set off my airbag or give me whiplash. It's the situation that's pissing me off.
I won't give any precise details of the location or the make of car in case any of this ends up in court or something, but I'll describe the crash itself because I'm genuinely interested to hear what people think about the liability for this one.
It's dual carriageway; the limit's 60 usually, but there are roadworks bringing the limit down to 40; so I reckon most people in the rush-hour traffic are doing about 50. So arrest them all, already. I'm approaching a point where the two lanes get divided by bollards on the cat's-eyes. The brake lights of the car in front of me come on, so I slow down, but the traffic is still moving quite fast. I then go through that excruciating and very quick series of — why are they slowing down? — brake a bit more — why are they still slowing down? — brake a bit more — oh shit — and I realise just too late that this car has inexplicably come to a complete stop and I can't swerve into the hard shoulder because it's full of a bloody great roadworks sign that I'd rather not have through my windscreen and head and I hit the back of the car.
My first thought was to wonder how I could have been so amazingly stupid not to have seen a tailback. But then I looked and saw that there wasn't a tailback. It was just this one car that had stopped.
The problem wasn't my stopping distance — I had plenty of that. The problem was that I didn't use it to stop. In fast-moving traffic, on a dual carriageway, with no junctions or traffic lights or obstructions or anything, I interpret brake-lights to mean "slowing down", not "stationary". I think most other drivers do the same. This, of course, is why so many drivers — me included — flick their hazard lights on at the first sign of a stoppage on a motorway: brake-lights alone aren't a strong enough signal in that context.
Now, I reckon I'm partly to blame for this. No matter what else, I am responsible for not driving into the car in front of me. But I don't think I'm mostly responsible. I know that you can fail your driving test for taking evasive action to avoid hitting a dog or cat, precisely because unpredictable driving makes the road more dangerous for every other driver on it and their lives are more important than an animal's, so I'm pretty sure that coming to a complete stop on a dual carriageway for no apparent reason would be an instant fail too. The other driver claimed afterwards that she had stopped because she suspected, but wasn't sure, that the car to her right might be trying to change lanes. This is another thing that was drummed into me in my driving lessons:
never give way — again, because traffic is safe when it's predictable, and giving way when you don't have to makes it unpredictable and therefore unsafe for every other driver on the road.
What annoys me is that, as the law stands, absent witnesses to say otherwise, the person behind in a tail-ender is 100% to blame, no matter what. This instance strikes me as a little more complicated than that — and, to be fair, the other driver didn't seem to think she was blameless either. Trouble is, since she was in front, no matter what she thinks, her insurers will deny all liability, because they can. My insurers were quite reasonable and honest: they said that, if she's come to a complete stop on a dual carriageway, then she's largely to blame for the accident, and I stand no chance whatsoever of having the official record reflect that.
I only have third-party insurance. I was going to be selling the car in a couple of weeks anyway, and it's hardly worth my while getting it repaired just to sell it on. It's a few hundred quid down the drain for me either way. Oh well.
It's great when
they screw up.
Looks like Al Qaeda have a new tactic:
find the stupidest people in the world, and recruit their friends.Locals claimed that the 22-year-old changed his name to Mohammed Rasheed last year ....
He repeatedly watched video footage of the September 11 attacks and had a poster of the burning Twin Towers on his wall, friends claimed.
They said that he was “naive and easily lead” and had attempted to commit suicide several times.
....
Friend Alli Turner, 17, said Reilly would watch videos of the New York terrorist attacks and tried to kill himself several times.
He said: ... “He always used to say that he had been told you will get a better life when you die if you are a Muslim.
“He was on his computer all the time and he changed his wallpaper on his computer to a picture of the Twin Towers.
“He once said he goes to 'secret meetings’ when no-one is allowed if they are not a Muslim. ...”
That's certainly a tricky jigsaw. What kind of a man could ever put such pieces together?
Well, not this one.
“Everyone thought it was weird and something was going on but I didn’t think it was anything as serious as terrorism.”
No, could've been anything.
Beck's beer have been running their "Only four ingredients" ad campaign for a while now. Don't get it, myself: I mean, Diet Coke's got
hundreds of ingedients, and it tastes great. But it appears to have triggered some competition: there's a Stella Artois poster gone up in my street boasting that they, too, only use four ingredients. (Are Evian going to go down this route, I wonder? "Only one ingredient"? Come to think of it, Shredded Wheat have been running that one for a couple of years now: "Nothing but absolutely nothing but one hundred percent whole wheat, because reading ingredients labels is just too damn complicated and the only food you can really trust is stuff with nothing else in it." For some reason, these ads are always followed
immediately by "And why not try our new Shredded Wheat Bitesize with fruit and sugar and loads of other stuff added?" Go figure.)
Anyway, the thing that struck me about the Stella Artois poster was, well, this:
Only four ingredients.
Hops. Malted barley. Maize. Water.
Is there some brewing-industry technicality that means that that isn't five ingredients? Or are they just hoping that no-one notices?
