Image of Jesus seen in picture of Jesus

Well, it's about the last place the faithful no, gullible and/or desperate for their 15 minutes have actually looked for an image of their lord and saviour, various of them having claimed to have seen him in clouds, random bits of wood, chocolate bars and even ruined cookware.*

Toby Elles, 22, made the discovery after burning the food when he fell asleep while cooking.
After lifting off the scorched bacon Mr Elles, from Salford, Lancs, could not believe his eyes when the Christlike image stared back at him.
The face is complete with eyes, nose, a beard and is framed by long flowing hair.

Well, let's have a look then.

Okay, I'll grant you that it looks kind of like a bearded man, but does that mean it's Jesus and not some randomised scraps of carbonised bacon fat? Not only does it seem unlikely that Jesus, who was Jewish if I recall, would choose to re-appear in bacon fat [and personally] I think it looks like John Lennon without his glasses.

However, let's for a moment assume that this is a benchmark for what the Son of Man looks like, and of course ignore the fact that what Yeshua of Nazareth actually looked like probably wasn't the medieval bearded guy from church windows or the BeeGee lookalike from more contemporary Christian art but a regular 1st century Palestinian male. So, if that's an image of Jesus who's this guy in the sock?

Sarah Crane, 38, said she was stunned when she saw a bearded man staring back at her from the laundry line.
Her boyfriend agreed the crumpled grey "holy sock" bore an uncanny likeness to the traditional image of Christ, and the couple took photographs to show their friends.

Oh, for fuck's sake. I'm going to regret this, but let's have a look anyway.

Really? Look, firstly that doesn't even look like a bearded man. I can see a face-like pattern, though that's perfectly natural and happens to people all the time, but to begin with I thought it look more like a robot than a human face before finally deciding that actually it reminded me a bit of Eddie from Iron Maiden album cover art.

Of course we're talking about the classic 1980s Eddie

And secondly, even if it did look like a bearded man it doesn't look like the bearded man in the frying pan who, it's suggested, is not John Lennon but our Redeemer, though unfortunately neither of them look a lot like I'd expect an ancient Palestinian to look and nor do they look like Jesus of Marmite Jar or Jesus of Cheap Interior Door.** And of course there's a reason for that: not everyone with a bloody beard is Jesus. I mean look up there at Eddie... see it? Beard. And Eddie the Head isn't even slightly saintly, much less Christ like. I shouldn't need to spell this out but beard ≠ Jesus.

Plus, and I realise this is obvious to both my readers, these things are not Jesus but are the leftovers of a couple of ruined slices of cured pig meat, a cheap sock, a few cents of plastic with some random blobs of yeast extract, and a fucking door. In fact the only three things that links these and any other example of the Jesus-appears-in-random-everyday-object phenomenon is their different looking Jesuses, their essential non-Jesusness that follows from the inability to agree on what Jesus looked like, and their being obsessed over by nutters. And by nutters I don't mean religious believers, though no doubt some are, but dedicated non thinkers who'd rather believe that they've been blessed by an entity whose existence is unproved, and if you ask me pretty doubtful, than that human beings are so naturally predisposed to recognising patterns that they see them in things that are random and patternless.

I mean, what's the alternative? Yes, the bloke who burned his bacon might like to think how miraculous it was he didn't die in the fire, but other people do die in fires all the time. Are we to believe that the Good Lord saves those who nod off while making bacon sarnies but not from dodgy wiring that they don't even know about? And the others, what do we make of those? Are B group vitamins particularly holy? Blessed are the squeaky doors, for they shall inherit the earth? Is the Bible wrong and Jesus actually say unto Peter "You are my sock, and on this sock I shall build my church" or does he just want to cure corns and verrucas?

Not if the experience of the sock Jesus woman is any indication.

They even talked about creating a shrine to the sock but then the face was lost when they moved it.

I was half expecting the Ascension to be mentioned at this point but fortunately for both my head and my desk it never came up. Instead, and almost as laughable, this:

"We think it's a bit of a sign - but for what we don't know."

Well, I can think of a couple of things that it could be a sign of. One is that you might just be a fucking idiot, and the other is that with electronic media making the space for online news practically infinite every day is a sufficiently slow news day for this stuff to be included, even if it's so ridiculous and embarrassing that nobody wants to put their byline on it.

I hope that 2012 will be the year this guff goes out of fashion in the MSM, but I'm not holding my breath. In fact I'm afraid that if that happens at all it'll only be because the 2012 Mayan apocalypse non-prediction and associated cockwaftery will be taking centre stage instead.

And there's no point saying "God help us" because if he's there at all he's probably too busy laughing.


* For those with the patience of Job or who find the whole thing funny (the only way I cope with this kind of lunacy) The Tele has a whole gallery of this stuff.
** Linking that really went against the grain.

Final countdown

I meant to mention this the other day but what with Christmassy stuff going on it slipped my mind. It's only 363 days until the world doesn't end. Yes, it's also only about half an hour until the world doesn't end as well, but Mexico isn't expecting millions of visitors to arrive any second so as to be closer to the ruins built by the people who are believed to have predicted the end of the world but in fact didn't predict any such thing at all.

''The world will not end, stressed Yeanet Zaldo, a spokeswoman for the Cancun area. ''It is an era.''

Quite. In the same way that when the modern calendar runs out this New Year's Eve the world won't end either. It's just that 2012 will start.

Not that that's stopping some famous(ish) names - George Lucas, Ashton Kutcher and Lil Wayne among them, as I blogged a while back - from seeking New Age wisdom in someone else's ancient history and getting it arse about face. Them and quite a few million other people.

That said, she's helping the area and a few others close by gear up for what is promising to be the region's biggest tourist season ever.

More than 52 million people are expected to visit the Quintana Roo (where Cancun is), Yucatan, Chiapas, Tabasco and Campeche regions. In an average year the whole of Mexico only gets 22 million tourists.

And I don't blame them for wanting to cash in on this wave of the cashed up and credulous - I sure as hell would. Look, by all means go visit Mexico if you want to, but if you think the world's going to end it doesn't seem to matter much where you are so you might as well be somewhere that's important to you. If you think it's going to end and you're going to leave home and the people you care about to go get killed in Mexico then I suggest you try some of their excellent drugs while you're there, because if you don't make any sense normally then you might was well try being off your tits on something instead. But I suspect the reality is that almost everyone who goes to Mexico next December will have booked a return flight.

I do hope so because they won't want to miss the real end of the world as (completely not) predicted over 30,000 years ago by the aborigines of south east Australia, which is due to begin at around four in the afternoon on Friday October 25th, 2013, on Wurundjeri Way just west of Melbourne's central business district. Or it might just be the queue for the freeway at the Montague Street junction, who knows? It's probably best to come and see for yourself when the time comes, but bring money. Bring lots of money.

Free gifts - the next thing to be on the restricted activities list?

Some things don't mix well, we all know that. Street luging on public roads is one, and we saw yesterday how that makes it a restricted activity you need to get permission for. Another is alcohol and, well, if you took the opinion of every nanny and wowser out there alcohol and practically anything, including life and happiness, don't mix. Certainly at least one will tell you that alcohol and promotions by way of free gifts don't because not everyone is as bright as him, and a handful of people do very stupid things when drunk. So obviously a branding iron that's given away with bottles of Jack Daniels is a bad idea because a tiny number of complete idiots will use them to brand each other.

Yes, this is going to be just like the two guys taking it in turns to shoot each other in the arse with an air rifle to see what it's like, but with extra nannying.

And straight away I feel the need to point out that the men didn't actually suffer burns in the promotion, as the very first line of the article makes clear.

THREE WA men suffered horrific burns after branding themselves with novelty branding irons given away as part of a Jack Daniel's promotion.

See? Saying they suffered burns in the promotion makes it sound like that was either a risk or even the idea of the promotion, or at the least something went horribly wrong. Nope, nothing like that at all. It's just that if you make enough novelty branding irons eventually one will end up in the hands of an idiot.

Cue the wowsers.

Health advocates are now demanding legislation that stops "reckless" alcohol marketing.

Reckless? Seriously? The brand was intended for steaks, as hinted at by the fact it was part of a barbecue set Jack Daniel's were including with a bottle, and what's reckless about branding a chunk of long dead cow? Naff, maybe, but reckless? Hardly, since they must have turned out thousands and thousands of these things, all but three of which have not been involved in any incidents as far as anyone knows.

The men, aged in their 20s and 30s including one who branded his backside...

Pffffft!

... were admitted to Royal Perth Hospital for surgery and emergency skin grafts. The last one was operated on earlier this month.
The others chose to plunge the hot metal rod with the words "Old No.7 Brand", in reference to the Tennessee bourbon, on the back of a hand and a leg.

Okay, sounds like serious injuries, but let's remember that this is part of a barbecue set, and unless you've invited Jeffrey Dahmer nobody, drunk or sober, is going to think it's supposed to be used on living people. But even so, just in case (or more likely as required by some nannying law) Jack Daniel's provided a label on the branding iron in order to state the completely bloody obvious.

... Jack Daniel's brand owner Brown-Forman Australia says it has done nothing wrong because the product comes with a warning [which reads:]

• This branding iron can cause serious skin burns.
• Do not touch metal parts with fingers, skin or any flammable material.
• Branding iron will remain hot long after being heated. Remove this label before first use.

Surely that's enough to keep the nannies happy? Nah, 'course not. Because the nannies want everyone to be treated the same as the daftest person in the country.

[Royal Perth hospital] head of plastic surgery and burns surgeon Mark Duncan-Smith branded the gimmick "an irresponsible cocktail for disaster".

Disaster? What, like the Japanese tsunami or the Christchurch earthquake? Well, it's a stretch but I could accept it as disastrous if hospitals all over the country were getting flooded with victims of these would-be killer barbie brands and the ambulances and burns units were starting to crack under the pressure, but the reality is there've been one self inflicted burned hand, one self inflicted burned arm and one self inflicted burned arse. Disaster? Seriously? In fact even these three victims of their own machismo/masochism aren't complaining, presumably because being daft enough to stick pieces of hot metal on themselves on purpose doesn't mean they're too daft to realise it was their own fault. If so then this, in my opinion, makes them brighter than the one solitary person who did complain.

[Brown-Forman managing director Marshall Farrer] said the only injury complaints he had received nationally were from Dr Duncan-Smith in WA.

I wonder, would this possibly be Dr Mark Duncan-Smith of the Royal Perth Hospital plastic surgery and burns department? I don't think we need to ask.

"You can't stop everyone from doing something silly, but when you are actually providing a method for people to injure themselves, even though it is still their responsibility, it is providing fuel in one hand and a lighter in the other," [Dr Duncan-Smith] said.

No, they get the fuel and the lighter from Bunnings, or the supermarket or the local petrol station or any of dozens of places, and they can do plenty of damage just with those and without a novelty branding iron. But, as with the branding iron itself, almost nobody does. And it's not providing a method for people to injure themselves any more than selling barbecues is providing a method for people to cook each other.

"It is a devastating mix. The combination of alcohol and a branding iron is just crazy. It is a cocktail of diminished capacity and a mechanism to inflict serious damage. I personally think this is madness."

Interesting. I wonder if the doc would say it's more mad or less mad than taking a sample of three idiots - and a self selecting sample at that - and taking that to mean the whole country is just as dopey with a few glasses of JD inside them? Leaving aside the obvious point of Dr Duncan-Smith's hideously paternalistic view of his fellow man this argument makes as much sense as estimating that there are 615 billion cats in Australia based on the sample in this room. It's nonsense, and it's infuriating that Perth Now seem unable to call him on it.

Nor is Dr Duncan-Smith the only one whining, even if he is the only one who actually complained to the company itself.*

McCusker Centre for Action on Alcohol and Youth director Mike Daube said there was a "glaring gap in curbs on alcohol promotion".
"These are entirely predictable outcomes from an outrageously irresponsible promotion," Prof Daube said.

Oh, really, Prof? Entirely predictable, are they? Well, I'm going to call that claim weapons grade bullshit, though I'd be delighted to eat my words and apologise if you can show us exactly where you predicted it. Because I've done a web search for your name in connection with Jack Daniel's, which I'd have thought would be sufficiently broad to pick any such prediction up if it made it into press or even if you'd put it on the MCAAY (pronounced "Mmkay?" in a South Parkian Mr Garrison voice, I guess) site, and would you like to guess what I found between the beginning of the promotion and the news of these three self inflicted burns cases from West Oz? Go on, have a guess.

Oh, alright, I'll tell you: not a fucking thing.

Entirely predictable, Prof Daube? My unburnt, non-supperating, pristine and entirely healthy arse.

"There are no controls whatever none on alcohol promotions of this kind." He said he would write to the federal and state governments calling for measures to halt irresponsible alcohol promotions.

Look, the range of humanity from stupid to sensible is going to be such a wide bell curve that simply whispering that alcohol exists is probably irresponsible for someone at one extreme end, but you'd have to go to insane lengths to come up with something that's irresponsible even for everyone in the middle, much less the Spock-like people at the far end. A free pallet of booze for anyone who drives themselves to the bottle shop having snorted more coke than Tony Montana might qualify, but some piece of tat for branding your steaks certainly doesn't.

And so we turn, but only because we're forced, to the politicians. You just know it's not going to turn out well, don't you?

State Mental Health Minister Helen Morton, who is also responsible for drug and alcohol issues, supported regulation changes on alcohol promotions, but said it was a federal matter.

Well, of course she does. She's a politician seeing an excuse to get a bit of media, possibly encouraged by some of the people in her ministry who've just seen a half-arsed justification for extending the remit of their department or by people who just want to extend the role of the state in our lives in general. It's as Reagan once said, the instinct of governments is that if it moves they should tax it, if it keeps moving they should regulate it and if it stops moving they should subsidise it - they never look and think that maybe they should just leave it the hell alone. And I don't take any comfort from a state politician bouncing it up to the federal government because the federal government is likely to take one look and either tax it, regulate it or subsidise it, possible even all three at the same time, regardless of whether it moves or not.

But what I really find bizarre is that the WA Health Minister understands something about people and governments and legislation. Something most people understand, even the ones sticking branding irons in the barbecue for a bit before trying to make their own gluteus the property of an American drinks company.

"However, at the end of the day, how can we legislate against that level of stupidity," she said.

You can't, Helen. It's an exercise in futility, and that being so what the hell's the point of regulation changes on alcohol promotions? Accept that a tiny number of people will do something daft with practically anything we can imagine, and that an even smaller number of people will remove themselves from the gene pool in the process.

But never forget that the vast majority of people won't.

* I wonder if he writes to car manufacturers every time he has to hide the scars on someone who was injured because they or someone else was screwing around while driving? Or is it just alcohol that lights up his brain's complaint node?

Too bad

Click for linky

Cynthia Crawford, who worked as Lady Thatcher's personal assistant from 1978, said the Hollywood biopic was likely to upset her friends and family.
She said the opening scenes of The Iron Lady, starring Meryl Streep, were likely to be particularly distressing as they show her suffering from dementia.

I have exactly the same thing to say to offence seeking right wingers as to their offence seeking left-wing oppos. There is no right to not be offended and there never can be such a right because I for one would find the imposition of it extremely offensive (and no, I'm not saying that to be bloody difficult but because I'm a fucking adult my skin's thick enough that I don't need some paternalist twats wringing their hands on my behalf). If someone says something you don't like, don't listen. If they say something you think is wrong then debate it. If they make a film that you think is unfavourable to someone you admire in that it portrays them with dementia, even though they really do have dementia in real life, then just don't go and watch it. And so on.

This is not rocket science. Grow up and get over yourselves.

Hell hath no fury like a public sector union ridiculed

Oooh, Jezza, you are in trouble now. It was one thing having a pop at the Prime Mentalist of Britain and his eyesight, though I felt the term 'one-eyed Scottish idiot' just served to identify exactly which of the 600 or so idiots was being talked about in case anyone didn't catch the name, but how very dare you use a typically hyperbolic expression that only a attention seeking moron with a Pavlovian response to take offence to almost anything would take literally when talking about the heroic public sector workers.

Heroic workers

Within hours, public servants had bombarded the BBC with more than 4,700 complaints, but Dave Prentis, the general secretary of Unison, took matters further. He said Clarkson’s “revolting” comments were “totally outrageous, and they cannot be tolerated”.

Okay, more than 4,700 complaints from the two million or so that Dave Prentis claims were striking. I make that less than a quarter of one per cent who got sufficiently bent out of shape about it to complain. Or who knows, perhaps a quarter of one per cent is about the number who complained when they were told to by Dave Prentis? Or any combination of the two.

Or is it 4,700 out of the six million or so people in Britain who are either in the public sector or who depend on it for a living, making it well below a tenth of one per cent? Or should we go the whole way and just say that it's 4,700 out of the 50 million or so adults in the UK, making it less than one per cent of one per cent. I suppose given the minority rule model of democracy practised in the UK and favoured by left and right alike, but I feel especially the left, acting on the wounded feelings of one person in every ten thousand seems almost reasonable.

Clarkson should be sacked by the BBC, he said, adding that the union was “seeking urgent legal advice about what further action we can take against him and the BBC, and whether or not his comments should be referred to the police”.

Britain having long since given up any pretence of free speech. Look, Dave, this is a phrase that's been used by people in the same exaggerated style for decades. as pointed out in The Tele by James Delingpole.

... he was employing it as a figure of speech. I know this won't mean much to half the morons who complained to the BBC yesterday, but the English language is an extraordinarily rich and nuanced thing. Sometimes, when the speaker says that someone should be shot, he really does mean it: if, say, it's an officer giving orders to a firing squad about to shoot a deserter or a looter in 1915. More often, though, he doesn't. For at least the last fifty years "they should be taken out and shot," has been a socially acceptable, perfectly unexceptionable way of expressing colourfully and vehemently one's distaste towards a particular category of unpleasantness, be it striking Unison workers, revolting students, poorly performing members of your football team or the Lib Dem members of Cameron's cabinet. Context is all.

And that's easily confirmed by googling variants of the phrase and setting filters to exclude all the stuff from the past couple of days. In a couple of minutes I'd found people who'd said that health nuts should all be shot, jobless hippies should all be shot, fairweather motorbikers should all be shot, people who like Elvis Presley should all be shot, and somewhat ironically, someone who'd said journalists should all be shot. Jeremy Clarkson, having certainly started out as a journalist and I expect technically still being one, would Dave Prentis and the 4,700 complainers be leaping to his defence in the belief that he's about to be killed?

And calling in the police? For heaven's sake, Dave, do you have any idea how ridiculous that looks to people in the real world? If Clarkson had control over people who both had the means to take strikers out and shoot them and were willing to do it then maybe, just maybe, it might have been incitement. But Clarkson doesn't control the judicial system, police and military, does he? He doesn't even control what he describes as the pokey little motoring programme of which he's a third of the presenters, much less its entire fan base - very few of whom in the UK would possess guns and even fewer of whom would think his comments were anything more than his usual over the top style.

It's not a crime, Dave - no, not yet even in non-free speech Britain - if no rational person would take it seriously, and on that point what does it say about you and the 4,700 complainers that you do seem to take it seriously? I mean, if they really think a right wing bigmouth like Clarkson would mean it when he says he'd have people shot and could follow up on it would they themselves be dragging people into the street if Ed Milivanilliband had said it?

And now before I go any further, a mandatory blog warning in the spirit of regulations that don't yet exist but might one day. Readers with recent surgical stitches may be advised to look away now.

In a rant worthy of Clarkson himself, Mr Prentis suggested children watching the programme “could have been scared and upset by his aggressive statements”.

Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Ahahahahahahahaha. Ahahah. Hoohoohoohoo. Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Ahahahahahaha.

Dave, are you that desperate to score a point or are you actually clinically delusional? Look, this is how the BBC describe The One Show: "Magazine show with topical reports, features and interviews from around the UK."Do you really think any child of the narrow age group that is old enough to understand what was said but too young to recognise it as nothing more than exaggeration for cheap laugh (which of course was the reaction it got in the studio, and is probably the kind of thing that helps children learn what not to take literally) would be watching? I don't mean in the room at the same time it was on, I mean looking and listening and paying attention to the content. I'd suggest the number to be hovering right around zero with even less remembering it by the next morning, though I'll concede that there might be a few whose heads were turned to the TV by loving but very PC and extremely fucked up parents who whispered, "That nasty man on telly says he wants to take mummy and daddy away from you forever." They might still be upset because some tool of a union boss keeps bloody going on about.

Seriously, Dave, this is almost the right-on version of Godwin's Law. "Won't someone think of the chiiiiiiiiiiiiiiildren" is the last refuge of a scoundrel, and when someone resorts to it it's a good sign that their argument holds less weight than a paper bag that's been left in a puddle of piss for a month and won't smell much better. For that reason alone I think Dave Prentis loses any credibility and forfeits the argument.

We could call it Lovejoy's Law.

Midair shock death-risk sex horror Qantas outrage

Although I've not mentioned it for some time both my regular readers (hi Mum) will probably be aware that I think the Australian press have a bit of a thing for slating Qantas and that they do sometimes over egg that particular pudding. And here's another prime example of a classic media beat up involving Qantas, all from the online pages of the Murdoch owned papers, and all with near carbon copies of the same article.

A QANTAS pilot is under investigation over a mile-high scandal with a female passenger during a long-haul flight to Australia.
Passengers in the first class section of QF32 from London were stunned at the pilot's amorous antics with the woman.
He was seen sitting on her lap during the flight in the luxurious premium section of the Qantas A380 jet before things became quite steamy, sources told the Herald Sun.

EXCLUSIVE: A Qantas pilot is under investigation over a mile-high scandal with a female passenger during a long-haul flight to Australia.
Passengers in the first class section of QF32 from London were stunned at the pilot's amorous antics with the woman.
He was seen sitting on her lap during the flight in the luxurious premium section of the Qantas A380 jet before things became quite steamy, sources told the Herald Sun.

A QANTAS pilot is under investigation over a mile-high scandal with a female passenger on a flight to Sydney.
First class passengers on QF32 from London to Sydney were stunned at the pilot's antics with a woman in seat 2A. He was seen sitting on the woman's lap during the flight in the luxurious premium section of the A380 jet before things became more heated.

Shock! Outrage! Disgust! How dare this individual leave the controls of the aircraft for a bit of a sweaty fumble. Not only is it a disgraceful dereliction of duty but also an issue of demarcation - everyone knows that with Qantas it's the stewardesses responsibility to have sex with the passengers.* Not an unreasonable reaction to those headlines, but on further reading it turns out that nothing like that actually happened.

The pilot was off-duty and not in uniform at the time of the incident.

So what's the big deal and why the lurid headlines? Basically what we have here is a pair of passengers, one of whom happens to be an employee of the airline and whose job is to fly planes, got frisky in First Class and had to be told to pack it in a few times before the cabin crew ended up separating them. Probably happens all the time, and the only thing that makes this any different from any other incident where a couple of passengers have to have the mid air equivalent of a bucket of cold water thrown over them is that the guy's a pilot for the same airline and should reasonably be expected to know that that behaviour isn't tolerated on their planes. As a result of that he's under investigation, but it sounds more like an internal Qantas investigation than anything official - The Telegraph headline may say 'court hears' but neither their article nor either of the others mention any court at all, just what sounds like a Qantas in-house disciplinary. And of course if the guy hadn't worked for Qantas there wouldn't even be that. Hell, if he'd been ground crew he'd have had the same investigation but the papers wouldn't have bothered to report it because there's no much value in headlines like this:

Qantas check in guy gets steamy midair

Qantas baggage handler's wild blue wander as court hears of mile-high scandal

If you'll pardon the pun, they don't exactly fly, do they? But because it's a pilot we can go crazy with the headlines and make it look like it was one of the blokes flying the plane who decided to leave the flight deck and try entering the cockpit instead, at least until people get down to paragraph four when it's finally mentioned that the guy wasn't actually working at the time and had no more to do with flying the plane than the fat guy trying to sleep back in 56G or the bawling child kicking the back of his seat. It seems it's not always about what's newsworthy but about making something newsworthy out of something irrelevant, especially when it comes to the Aussie media and their national carrier. Just you wait and see how they'll cover a real emergency, like one of the toilets running out of soft paper and having to use that horrible cheap shiny stuff instead.

* Kidding, of course. It's been a while since I last flew but when I've used Qantas I've found the cabin crew to be polite, helpful, professional and incidentally pretty easy on the eye, but none of them have ever offered me sex instead of tea or coffee. Maybe you just have to be Lord Voldemort. This is in contrast to the booking departments of several airlines which have certainly fucked me in various ways, generally involving the words 'extra charge'.

Oranges are not the only fruit death kill weapons

I know people on supermarket checkouts haven't been hired to think, just to swipe barcodes over lasers for hours at a time, and I do realise that must be pretty mind numbing but surely something's badly wrong when staff lack the initiative to question anything the till tells them. F'instance:

A chef was stunned to find she was almost banned from buying two limes from a supermarket - because they could be classed as a weapon.

Can I just repeat that the woman is a chef. Have you seen the knife collection the average chef has?

They keep them bloody sharp too, and since they're for professional use I'd bet they can carry them around without getting arrested so much.

Marisa Zoccolan, 31, popped into the new Asda supermarket close to her home in Wallsend, North Tyneside, to pick up some groceries, including the citrus fruits.
But when she tried to pay for them at the self-service checkout, the message 'amount exceeded, authorisation required' flashed up.
An assistant then came over and told her that more than one lime was deemed a weapon - because the citric acid could be squirted in someone's eye.

Would that be the same stuff Asda sell in convenient quarter litre bottles for less than 50p?

Marisa, a self-employed caterer said: 'I thought they were taking the pip, but the assistant told me the same applied to lemons."

Nope, I think you'll find that lemons are a special case, and Asda sells the ammo for those too.

Or is it just plastic ones with 'Jif' written down the side?

Thankfully for Ms Zoccalan, who lives with partner Jacqui Nicholson, 37, and dog Doobie, the assistant allowed Marisa to eventually buy both of the fruits.
'Yes, they vetted me and let me buy them."

Oh, God. Not "They thought about it for about half a second and realised that since the whole bloody thing was patently ridiculous the best thing to do was apologise and get a supervisor to come and override the till." No, they fucking vetted her. What this involves we're not told, but I'm guessing Marisa Zoccolan told them she was a chef and that limes were not weapons but ingredients - it not being all that hard to find recipes that include the instruction "take the juice of two limes" - and they then asked her for something that showed she was indeed qualified to handle such lethal objects and safely make interesting desserts out of them. If it was anything even vaguely like that then that's barely any better than refusing point blank to let her buy the limes and sticking with the retarded belief that a small green citrus was significantly more dangerous than a zillion other things kicking around the average home or office.

And in a way it's a shame they're not really a practical weapon because I know the perfect place to become the world's first citrus supervillain. I'd have got away with it if it hadn't been for those Asda kids.

The Big Orange in Berri, SA. Photo by Bilby.

Tip of the Akubra to Nanny Knows Best.

That's you lot told

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Wolfgang Schäuble said that, despite the current crisis in the eurozone, the euro will ultimately emerge as the common currency of the entire European Union. He said he “respects” Britain’s decision to keep the pound, but insisted that the survival and eventual stabilisation of the euro will convince non-members to join the currency club. “This may happen more quickly than some people in the British Isles currently believe,” he added.

The message to the UK is obvious - it's not your country anymore. But there is another way of reading it, another subtext below the one which really barely qualifies as subtext: we've nailed our colours to the Euro mast and its unravelling, and we're hoping like hell another big economy jumping on board will manage to keep it going and save our careers and/or reputations. I'm not sure that isn't a bit optimistic given Britain's level of debt and the fact that the Cobbleition government are really no less profligate with other people's money than their predecessors, but from here it seems like time is running out. The Euro car had a dodgy handbrake and was parked on a hill by a cliff, and now the bugger's rolling toward the edge and everyone who helped pay for the car is running like hell after it hoping to stop it in time. Getting a country with a good credit rating on board (though fuck knows why the UK still has a good rating) might buy them some more. Either that or when the car reaches the cliff Britain won't have an advantage over those that kept running after it right over the edge.

The alternative is pretty clear. Herr Schäuble must be told, in no uncertain terms, to fuck off.

Not just the heirs to Blair

Nope, the Cobbleition is also a proud wearer of the Crown of Brown.

UK Financial Investments said it has agreed to sell 100pc of Northern Rock to Virgin Money for £747m in cash immediately, but this could potentially rise to around £1bn.
Under the deal, another £50m is “expected” to be paid within six months. The Treasury will also benefit by up to £80m if the bank floats in the next five years and retain £150m of Tier 1 capital notes.
Northern Rock, which signalled the start of the financial crisis in Britain when it collapsed in August 2007, is the first bank to be returned to the private sector.
The Newcastle-based lender received a £1.4bn bail-out when it was nationalised in February 2008 at the height of the credit crunch. So on paper, taxpayers end up with a loss of £400m, but this could rise to £650m.

Marvellous. Just fucking marvellous. Memo to Gordon Clown, and of course also to his blinky pet Ed Balls who sadly did quite not lose his seat in the election:

This is why you should have let Northern fucking Rock go to the wall,
you witless pair of financially incompetent cunts.

Happily for them, though miserably for everyone else, they're not alone.

George Osborne said the deal was a “good thing” for taxpayers, consumers and the banking system.

Did he say that? Did he really fucking say that? The Chumpcellor of the fucking Exchequer thinks that losing nearly half a billion quid, and possibly as much as two thirds of a billion, is a good thing. Has Gordon Brown got his fist up George's arse and is making his mouth move or something? That's got to be the most retarded thing to come out of the mouth of the finance minister of an industrialised nation since some fucktroon decided to sell nearly 400 tons of gold near a long term low in its value, and then fucking announce it in advance so the price fell even further. Oh, and that was a British one too, wasn't it? Come to think of it, it was... well, we all know only too well, don't we?

And although it wasn't quite on the scale of the billions and billions Gordon flushed away when he dumped gold at a historic low, which his mouth may well have helped make lower, Boy Georgie thinks it was a good thing for taxpayers to lose another half billion or so. Yes, the Cobbleition inherited the situation, and yes, it was Gordon, his badger faced sock puppet and Ed Bollocks who made the incredibly bad decision to bail out a bank that deserved to fail rather than just make sure of the investors' statutory protection. And yes, in that position you have to take the best offer you're going to get, and this is probably better than it might have been. But to have the new-ish Chumpcellor stand there saying it's anything than the loss of another half a billion pounds, perhaps more, is anything other than a colossal fuckup due entirely to the headless chicken panic response of the previous government is at best not very politically astute and at worst an indication that he's every bit as fucking stupid as they were.

And of course it's not over yet because only the good bit of Northern Rock was sold, which is presumably why they only got £747m for it. Oh, no what we can still think of as Northern Wreck is still there. And it's got company.

In January last year the company was split into a “good bank”, which Virgin has bought, and Northern Rock Asset Management, the “bad bank” of closed mortgages and unsecured loans which remain in Government ownership.
[...]
As well as Northern Rock’s “bad bank”, UKFI still owns Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds Banking Group and Bradford & Bingley.

And I don't doubt that if or when RBS, Lloyds Group and B&B are sold back into the private sector at a further loss to the taxpayers Georgie Lame will say that's a good thing too. It's good that it's over, but in all other respects it's hard to find anything good to say about the taxpayers having to drop their trousers and grip their ankles yet again because the fucking Treasury (along with most or all of the rest of government) has got next to no fucking clue how to spend money wisely and thinks there's an inexhaustible supply of it.

Jesus Christ on a borrowed bicycle, the place is fucking doomed.

Occupy Hinton St Mary... inside village hall if raining

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The collection of 13 tents houses a group calling themselves Occupy Exeter, in tribute to similar movements which began in New York and spread around the world.
It comes after widespread criticism of the ongoing demonstration set up outside St Paul's Cathedral in London, which last month forced the building to close for the first time since the Blitz.
The protesters did not disrupt either the Remembrance Sunday service or two minute silence held yesterday, which attracted hundreds of people to the cathedral's main entrance, and laid their own 'Occupy Exeter' wreath covered with poppies next to their camp.
One of the group said: "We don't want to antagonise people at the service. We have removed any placards which might have caused offence today.
"We are making sure the site is clean and we are recycling everything."

Ah, well, fair enou... Wait, what? Exeter? For fuck's sake, why Exeter? Was the train fare to London a bit out of reach or something? The grass a bit warmer on the bum than the cold slabs of paving outside St Paul's?

Jeez, I thought Occupy Melbourne was a bit lame. Don't get me wrong, I love Melbourne - I came ten thousand miles to live here - but despite a few banks and trading companies here I don't think it's really what you'd call a major hub of the financial world what with the Australian Stock Exchange being based in Sydney and all. Still, Sydney is 500 miles away and you can understand that that's a bit of a trip. But Exeter? Nothing against Exeter either, but if I can't put my hand on my heart and say Melbourne is a financial hub of teh ebil capitalist societeh then Exeter sure as hell isn't, and it's only a couple of hours or so on an express train from one of the most important financial centres in the world. Can you get much more tame without descending to the level of Occupy Budleigh Salterton or Occupy The Cricket Green, But Out Of The Way Just Behind The Sightscreen? Or, since on a worldwide level they're almost certainly as much 1%ers as the ebil banksters they're protesting against, the unbeatably slacktivist Occupy My Own Bedroom For A Bit?

Protest when and where you like by all means, but if you want to be taken seriously I'd suggest training, hitching or biking it to London and being in the place where the thing you're complaining about actually is, which I thought was the whole bloody point of the Occupy thing in the first place. And if it means the inconvenience of travel and the discomfort of cold concrete I have good news - there's a handy spray which can help.

Don't whine at me, Argentina

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Who knew that rather than just being a member of an archaic institution and a somewhat dysfunctional family as well as a well known but strategically insignificant member of the armed forces, Prince William was in fact a one man invasion force capable of toppling a country of 40 million people, storming the place all by himself with more weapons on his back than a first person shooter videogame character, in the bare space of a month and a half? Not me, I had no idea at all.

Can't think why - I mean just look at the fucker

Oh, wait, no, he's just one guy, the war's been over for just slightly longer than he's been alive, and it's not a even a combat posting - there not being any actual combat - but a few weeks of SAR duty.

The Duke, a Flight Lieutenant with the RAF and second in line to the throne, will complete a tour of duty as a search and rescue helicopter pilot on the islands in February and March.

So why...

April will mark the 30th anniversary of the start of the Falklands War and the arrival of a member of the Royal Family at such a time risks inflaming the already tense relations between Britain and Argentina.
La Nacion newspaper in Buenos Aires reported that there was "ample evidence of discontent" at the Argentine Foreign Ministry over the announcement and said the Argentine government believes the move adds to London's "aggressive attitude".

Oh, please. The British Prime Minister hasn't got the balls to tell a diminutive snail muncher to get to fuck and has only ever shown any signs of being at all intimidating when it comes to his own MPs, and even then he delegates the job to the fucking whips. I've stepped in more aggressive puddles.

Look, Argentina, what we have here is a fella whose real job doesn't become available until his gran and his dad cark it and in the meantime is trying to feel useful. Fair play to him for that, because I'd say his dad's as much use as a glass cricket bat in the hands of an Australian batsman. So why spoil it for him?

Sheesh! Talk about mountains out of molehills.

Let's get the flock out of here

Or if we're talking about pigs, the herd. And obviously that's a lot easier if the herd has its own fully signed, designated escape route which it knows because there have been escape drills. Yes, we're still talking about pigs, and no I'm not making this up. I've banged my head on the desk once or twice but this bloody article is still there.

Click for linky and loss of will to live

If fire engulfs a piggery in Monto, its residents can rest easy. That fluorescent exit sign above the doors will save their bacon.

And also saves me making that joke. Predictable, I know, but better than the 'hamstrung' one the Courier Mail used in their headline.

In one of the most ridiculous rules stifling small business in Queensland, piggery operators are required to install illuminated exit signs inside pens occupied solely by pigs.

Okay, look, I know pigs are supposed to be relatively intelligent creatures but I can spot two flaws with this. Flaw number one is that I'm pretty confident they're not that intelligent. Flaw number two, and this is important for anyone who believes you can teach a pig what a sign's for, is that's a running fucking MAN on the emergency exit sign.

But it's okay because after that the rules begin to make sense. No, just kidding, they don't.

Regulations also demand an escape door for pigs to use in case of fires...

You might already spot the potential problem here.

... but which farmers fear the animals can use any time.

Which suggests that someone in the Queensland government has failed to recognise that emergency exits aren't used all the time because you can explain to people that this exit, this one over here, is for emergencies only and that one over there is for coming and going as you please. This is simple enough even for a fairly young child to grasp, but I wish you the very best of luck if you're hoping to explain it to farmyard animals. You're going to need every bit of it.

Oh, and then there are the fire drills. Fire drills! That must have been funny enough to sell tickets for.

"Right, we'll try again. Now, Napoleon?"
"Oink?"
"When I blow this whistle you call Pinkeye and Squealer..."
"Squeeeeeeaal!"
"No, listen..."
"Squeeeeeeeeeeaaal!"
"Just listen a minute..."
"Squeeeeeeaaloinkoinkoink."
"Ah, screw it. They'll all be in bits on cold shelves in a few weeks anyway."

"A concrete block shed with steel roof trusses and corrugated iron roof, built to hold 60 pigs in four pens, had to have a fire hose, an illuminated "EXIT" sign above each of the two doors and an evacuation procedure displayed in a prominent position," former pig farmer Darryl Stewart told an industry survey.

A fire hose? But how... ?

"The biggest difficulties were teaching the pigs to read the signs and procedures, conducting fire drills so the building could be evacuated in orderly fashion and training the four most intelligent pigs as fire fighters.

Presumably chosen from among Pugh, Pugh, Barney MacGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble and Snouter.

And it had to be done all over again every three months because that is when a new batch replaced the old batch.
"Oh, and rounding them up from anywhere within a 5km radius after every fire drill was not much fun either."

Okay, I am actually laughing now because I've got this mental picture of pigs running in every direction apart from back to the piggery, and there is Benny Hill music. Still, this is a former pig farmer and he's probably kidding, right? Right?

Ian Hill, of Bailey Creek Piggeries in Mulgildie, confirmed to The Courier-Mail exit signs were legally required in pens.
"It's one of the council requirements that when you put a building in that they want illuminated exit signs at every piggery building," he said.
[...]
A Biloela piggery owner confirmed signs and particular types of doors that pigs could use in a fire were a legal requirement.
"We had a fire inspector come through here when we put up sheds years ago, and he made us put in fire extinguishers, put up the illuminated signs ... There's no deviation," he said.

And of course the serious side to this is that of costs to business. Someone's got to go out and buy signs which are meaningless to the inhabitants of the buildings they're put up in, plus install and maintain equipment that those inhabitants can't operate with trotters or even comprehend the purpose of - with the exception of the pig operable doors that are supposed to be for emergency use. Not only that but you can't cut corners because there are inspections, and to cap it all your taxes are helping pay not just for the inspectors' wages but also the clown who I'm guessing saw Porky the Fireman while stoned off his dial and thought it was a good idea.

Memo to the Queensland government. Don't attempt to teach a pig Occ. Health and Safety. It wastes your time and annoys the pig, but really infuriates the poor sod who has to pay for it.

There oughtta be a law against it

Oh yes, a law. God forbid that we should sit down and think an important decision through rationally. That would never do, so having done something remarkably silly that we now regret we should demand that the state protect us from ourselves. That's partly so that nobody else makes the same mistake, but when it's something really exceptional that very, very few other people are inclined to do in the first place I can't help but wonder if people demanding a law actually want it to stop themselves. In case they try to do it again.

Susan Tollefsen became a mother after receiving IVF treatment at 57 from a Russian clinic in 2008, where she conceived daughter Freya.
Many criticised her decision, saying she was too old to become a parent.

Not me. Personally I wouldn't, but if someone's decided to ignore nature's subtle hints I'm inclined to trust that they've thought it through. All the way through. Of course I would be aware that that trust might be misplaced, but with nothing to contradict it I'd still give them the benefit of the doubt.

At the time, Mrs Tollefsen defended her choice and pointed out that her partner Nick Mayer was 11 years her junior – and would therefore be around to care for their daughter Freya during all of her childhood.

So she had thought it all the way thr... oh.

However, she says the couple have now split and concedes her critics were right as she encounters the difficulties of bringing up a three-year-old child alone at the age of 61.

Right, so apart from the 'what if my partner's not around' point she thought it through.

"Every Saturday he wanted to go and watch them, either home or away, and some weekdays. I felt as if he didn’t want his life to change at all after Freya came along, even though mine had changed completely."

Okay, okay, she didn't really think it through far enough at all, and if he thought it wasn't going to change his life much then I'd say he didn't think it... ooooh, footie. In fairness to both of them it strikes me that this isn't unique to people their age getting IVF - sadly there are plenty of children who were conceived naturally but whose conception was ill conceived, and whose parents love their offspring, sorta kinda, but miss the days they didn't have this small person depending on them so much. Tough shit, folks. If you want your life to stay the same as it is now the obvious thing to do is not fucking change it.

"I never imagined it would work out this way,’ Mrs Tollefsen said. "I’ve never regretted having Freya but I’ve had to pay a heavy price for my dream of being a mother. In fact, it’s cost me my relationship. You think you’re madly in love with someone and you just don’t realise what they’re going to be like after you’ve had children."

/ looks skyward with hands in pockets and begins to whistle

So now she's decided as wonderful and precious as her daughter is to her it really wasn't such a smart move after all, and that means - you guessed it - she wants there to be a law to stop the infinitesimally small number of people who want to become a new parent in their late 50s from doing the same thing.

Mrs Tollefsen, who is deaf in one ear and having a knee replaced, also agrees that, with hindsight, there should be an age limit of 50 for IVF treatment for women in this country.

Except she's still not thinking things through properly, is she? Hello, Susan? You went ... Susan? Susan? Hello? Sorry, wrong ear. Hello, Susan, you went to Russia to get your IVF, remember? And if there'd been an age limit of 50 at the time, and remembering that the NHS won't provide IVF to anyone 40 or over and even private clinics tend to balk at treating women over 50, exactly how would that have stopped you from doing what you did? Exactly how would bringing in such a law now prevent any other woman whose desire for a child has eclipsed everything else, including rational thought and taste and decency...

"Sperm! Sperm! Sperm! Sperm! Lovely sperm, wonderful sperm!" *

... from doing the same thing? Unless you want this law to ban women over 50 from getting on a plane as well you simply can't prevent doing the same thing. Your own story is a cautionary tale and should put a few people off, but unless we want the already far too powerful nanny state to grow yet more powerful we must accept people ignoring advice and making short sighted decisions as being facts of life.


* Apologies to Monty Python for ruining one of their most famous skits.

Big Eco advertising your forthcoming death... again

Via Watts Up With That.



Okay, this is not as bad as the 1010 mob's gleeful explosive execution of anyone expressing ambivalence toward warble gloaming or that aborted video with hundreds and hundreds of airliners zooming towards a New York with smoke curling up from the World Trade Centre, but it's still pretty nasty. "You, you evil sceptics," goes the message, "You'll get it first." Not quite sure how that works - how can the climate tell who believed and us Untermenschen who weren't convinced? Maybe it's the same kind of magic by which the climate can tell difference between the evil CO₂ emitted by a power station or your breath and the benign and harmless CO₂ that's puffed out from the blowholes of whales and dolphins to feed their dear friends, the trees. Or maybe the climate is relying on the warble gloaming believers to muck and help with a set of matches. I've no idea, but somehow or other we're first in line for death despite the usual exhortations to cut down on our selfish energy use because poor people in developing nations are first in line for death. Consistency? Meh.

And so at this point I want to bring up my intermittently maintained list of warble gloaming dates for your diary, because a few weeks ago I noticed an addition spotted by The Filthy Engineer, who notes that in two-thirds of the spirit of reduce, reuse, recycle this has been reused and recycled since 2007.

Runaway Global Warming promises to literally burn-up agricultural areas into dust worldwide by 2012, causing global famine, anarchy, diseases, and war on a global scale as military powers including the U.S., Russia, and China, fight for control of the Earth's remaining resources.
Over 4.5 billion people could die from Global Warming related causes by 2012, as planet Earth accelarates into a greed-driven horrific catastrophe.

"Promises" does it? Then with less than two months 'til the start of 2012 we should see some signs of it already, shouldn't we? And "literally burn-up"? Seriously? Actual fields actually on actual fire? 4.5 billion of the world's 7 billion people dead (which still wouldn't be enough to satisfy the most extreme eco-psychos, such as this fucktroon)? As much as I'm prepared to believe that many warble gloaming catastrophists do actually believe what they claim, when someone comes out with ridiculously over the top scare claims like this I suspect that even they don't believe it. It's the old tactic suggested years ago by the late Dr Stephen Schneider of offering up scary scenarios to get attention even if they're vanishingly unlikely. I've no idea whether to blame overzealous PR of the kind Dr Schneider once suggested or journalistic license, but I suspect there's probably only one thing that's literally going to burn up.

Being generous and giving them 'til the end of next year the updated list now looks like this:

• Probably should have happened by now, or failing that should be possible to observe a very large change in that direction - New York's West Side Highway impassable due to being underwater - Dr. James Hansen (1988/89 interview)
• Probably should have happened around 2005 ± 1 yr - British children will not know snow in their own country - Dr David Viner (Independent, Mar 2000)
• "Imminently" - loss of world's coral reefs - David Attenborough in July 2009 ('world’s tropical reefs face ‘imminent destruction’ unless CO2 levels are slashed')
• By 2010 - 50 million refugees climate refugees (UN Environment Program - currently no link for UNEP site but Watts Up With That has details and evidence of claim)
• Between 2010 and 2015, probably earlier - ice free Arctic - Louis Fortier, director of ArcticNet, speaking to Canada.com in 2007
• 2012 - fields on fire and approximately two thirds of the entire planet's population dead
• Late 2013 - ice free Arctic - Al Gore (North Pole will be ice free in five years')
• 2014 - the whole world and everything fucked up beyond repair - WWF.
• Dec 2016 - the whole world and everything all fucked up beyond repair - the Prince of Wails and the 100 months mob
• Dec 2016 - loss of 'the levers of control' for the climate - the Prince of Fails... again.
• Late 2019 - ice free Arctic - Pen Hadow (ten years to Arctic ice loss)
• Late 2019 - the whole world and everything fucked up beyond repair - UK Met Office.
• Late 2029 - loss of Great Barrier Reef - marine scientist Charlie Veron ('global warming will destroy the World Heritage site within just 20 years')
• By approximately 2040 - ice free arctic yet again - NSIDC director Mark Serreze

Warble gloaming - I refuse to use the term climate change when climate has always been changing since the planet's ancient beginnings - warble gloaming might not need you to believe in it, but warble gloaming catastrophists very much do need you and everyone else to believe. Because they're all out of a job otherwise.

And people wonder how governments run up such huge debts

Take Italy, for instance. Everyone knows it's up a certain creek without a certain implement. Everyone knows that if the shit hits the fan in Greece Italy could be next. And yet the Italian government is buying 19 Maserati Quattroportes and modifying them with armour at a cost of a couple of million Euros... for just one ministry.

Italy's Ministry of Defence has been forced to defend its decision to purchase 19 Maserati limousines at a time when the government is cutting billions in public spending in response to the European debt crisis.
The four-door Maserati Quattroportes, which start from $118,000 in Italy and are powered by a 4.2-litre V8 engine, are reportedly replacing the ministry's fleet of Audis and Lancias. They have been armour-plated for additional protection.
[...]
Italy's defence minister, Ingazio La Russa, has accused the opposition of a "witch hunt", claiming the Maseratis were purchased using funds from the 2008-2009 budget and therefore before the introduction of cuts by the Silvio Berlusconi government.

A defence minister there, missing the point by a fucking mille miglia. Of course Britain should resist any temptation to get at all smug about this.

From Jan 18th

From August 14th

And let's be realistic, with the Cobbleition's track record over its 18 months driving the bus it won't be long before spend some money they haven't got on something far more catastrophically stupid.

Hallowe'economics

You cannot kill what does not live... Aaaahahahahahaha. Aaahahahahahahahaha. Aahahahahahahahaha.

The Prime Minister says the government is on an “all-out mission” to kick-start industry. Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, will announce that 35,000 jobs will be created using nearly £1 billion of public money.

That Keynes monster just refuses to die, doesn't it? You think it's gone, you think the horror has passed and that you're safe now, and then it turns out that it's right behind you. It's like that bloodied hand punching through the soil of the freshly dug grave at the end of Carrie, or seeing two more zombies as the doomed survivor reaches their last bullet, or that wisp of smoke from a small but growing pit on the floor as an acid dripping xenomorph comes out of the walls right after everyone thinks all the xenomorphs have been killed. I say we take off and nuke the whole Treasury from orbit - it's the only way to be sure.

He will unveil new investment in more than 100 projects that should trigger billions of pounds additional investment from private enterprise. It will include six “shovel-ready” projects, including two new power stations.

Shovel ready? Ah, this'll be grave robbery policy horror then? Shovels for Clegg's Igor to disinter a few policies from under a headstone marked "New Labour - 1997-2010 - Gone, not forgotten, and not fucking dead enough," before returning them to his cackling marthter Dr Camenstein to stitch together before giving it the old bolt of lightning treatment, am I right?

Speaking on the BBC’s Today programme this morning, Mr Clegg said: “What we’re trying to do is invest public money, taxpayers’ money, into companies which can create jobs that last, and for every pound that will be invested from the Regional Growth Fund we estimate about £6 will be matched from the private sector.
“We are trying to rewire the British economy so we are less reliant on the city of London and financial services and we’re giving more backing to manufacturing and to parts of the country which for too long were basically reliant on handouts from Whitehall.”

Ah, governments trying to pick winners. Another old monster that just won't die. Tell us, Cleggor, when your plan to reduce debt is to grow the economy fast enough to reduce the relative rather than the actual size of it but the growth forecasts have since turned out to be a bit on the optimistic side, what makes you think this magic figure of £6 of private capital being attracted for every pound you wast, er, spend now is any more accurate? Don't strain yourself trying to answer on your own, by all means dig up a fresh brain if you need to.

The Coalition has been criticised for not doing enough to boost growth, with Chancellor George Osborne too focused on reducing the country’s deficit.

He is? Was he planning to start any time soon? Did he get distracted by that bubbling beaker in the back room of Number 11? Oh, dear God, did he try some of it? Is this a strange case of Dr Osborne and Mr Darling... except he's somehow got stuck on Mr Darling? And if so would that actually be worse than him being stuck on Dr Osbourne? I'm honestly not sure it would.

Meanwhile, outside Castle Dracumong...

Mr Cameron will emphasise the need to bring super-fast broadband to remote areas, expecting private industry to match a £1 billion investment already announced from government and local authorities.

Is this the same billion pounds as the billion pound Nick Clegg was talking about or is it a different billion pounds? Did they clone it? Ah, yes, they just took it down to the quantitive easing laboratory and hit the duplicate button for a while. It'll all be fine. Probably. Unless the cloned money sneaks up and strangles the original money and then takes over its life, and then you'll try to buy something with the original money only to find that it's dead, DEAD, DEAD.

One Whitehall source said: “It is bringing forward infrastructure investment where possible, dealing with difficult planning decisions across Whitehall.
“This is the Prime Minister’s obsession with 'shovel-ready’ projects that could make a difference in the near-term. He has pushed for it and it is being delivered. He wants to ensure every sinew was strained to get the economy moving.”

Shovel ready again, we're back to Dr Frankermon. Or is he just a Pinhead? Not sure, really, it's hard to tell. No, wait, that's it. This is John Carpenter government and there is a Thing. Or rather a State-Thing, a crawling, creeping mass of unspeakable vileness that takes over and imitates its victims but never changes its intentions, always growing and feeding, feeding and growing, taking all it can and giving nothing but false appearances. We saw it with the last government, how it started off seemingly friendly and one of us before getting increasingly creepy and growing a hell of a lot of extra arms and legs, until eventually its head dropped off and was replaced by a misshapen, twisted, screaming thing that ate snot and hurled Nokias. We thought it destroyed but part of it must have got away and infected some of the others. Come to think of it the broken promises started way back so it must have happened a while before. No wonder the Tories are all sitting around a fire staring suspiciously at each other and trying to work out who, if any of them, really is a Tory. No wonder those who love democracy and those who love liberty are eyeing the Liberal Democrats and wondering if any of them are either.

No wonder the fucking nightmare didn't end last May. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!

Getting blood from a stone...

... must be something Oz's chief tax collector believes he really excels at, because he's asking for an extra $300,000 a year for it. No, not $300,000 but an extra $300,000 - he already gets (I won't say 'earns') half a million.

AUSTRALIA'S top tax official has come under sustained attack in a Senate hearing for lobbying to get himself a 58 per cent pay rise.
Tax Commissioner Michael D'Ascenzo is at present paid just over half a million dollars.
He has written to the Remuneration Tribunal asking for a package of around $800,000 to bring himself into line with other agency heads such as the head of the Securities and Investments Commission and the Competition and Consumer Commission.

Well if it's just a matter of bringing into line there's a perfectly good solution, though the heads of ASIC and the ACCC wouldn't like it, but to be honest I don't see why any bringing into line is necessary. If the job's worth a minimum of $800,000 then they wouldn't have been able to get anyone to do it for less. As it is Michael D'Ascenzo was prepared to do it for half a million and is now having an attack of the sads because some other people get more. I'd hope the tribunal recommend dropping the salary by the exact amount he wants it raised and seeing if anyone still wants the job.

Asked by Labor senator Doug Cameron how much extra he was planning to pay his own workers, he said the increase would be about 3 per cent.
Asked to put a percentage figure on the pay rise he wants for himself, he said he ''hadn't worked it out''.
An increase from $505,000 to $800,000 would amount to 58 per cent.

< Whistles > Hey, Occupy protestors. Greedy and exploitative fat cat alert, but you need to get your signs and arses over to Canberra and protest there. Seats of government are the root cause of everything you've got your cocks in a knot about anyway.

Mr D'Ascenzo defended the application, saying it was a matter of comparative wage justice.
Labor Senator Mark Bishop, who chairs the committee, said comparative wage justice hadn't been used as a basis for justifying wage increases since the 1970s and 1980s.

Good for Mark Bishop, and worthy of my 'Politician's getting things right' tag. But it must also be said that it's nice of Mr D'Ascenzo to bring it up in October, the end of which is the last date for getting tax returns in and so is a month when taxation is on many minds. I'm sure I can guess the thoughts going through most of those minds as they learn that the Australian Tax Office's capo di tutti capi (well, he runs the ATO and has an Italian name - if you think I'm not going to make a joke Mafia reference you're very much mistaken) already earns something like ten times the median salary and now wants more than half as much again.

I think it's an offer I think we can and should refuse.

Satellite apocalypse

No, I don't mean Big Brother Australia will be shown on Sky. I mean this:

We're doomed. Doomed, I tell you, dooooo...

... oh, just the size of a bus and weighing about six tonnes? And that's giant now, is it? I mean, I kind of assumed that giant meant, you know, giant. Biggest thing to have hit the planet since Tunguska, sort of thing. At the very least all the flapping would make you think that it's the biggest man made thing ever to have hit the plant. It's 'giant', after all. Except that if you use that word to describe something that weighs about the same as a luton van with some large furniture in the back, what word do you use to describe the 77 tonne Skylab that de-orbited and fell onto Western Australia in 1979? And since the article specifically mentions that Skylab was the 'biggest piece of space debris to fall from orbit' I wonder why The Teletubbygraph felt the need to spice up the headline with the giant thing. 32 years ago the rather more worrying news that 77 tonnes of space junk hit a populated country, albeit a pretty sparsely populated one and in a mostly empty area, was reported like this:

And the NYT headline now? A very un-scary 'Satellite to land, somewhere'.

Why is it the British press doing the beat ups? Why has the once respected Teletubbygraph joined in? Harden the fuck up, for heaven's sake.