À Propos de Rien

Random thoughts that aren't worth a page to themselves (5)

FARNELL: Your useless fucking website has started returning a 403 for any request where the user-agent string represents ANY desktop browser, regardless of which one it is, how old it is, what OS it's on or anything else. It only works if I spoof the user-agent of a fucking iphone and it doesn't work properly because the iphone version of the page is an unusable pile of old arse on a desktop (come to that, it looks like it'd be just as bleeding useless on an iphone too if I had one). This is FUCKING SHITE so SORT IT OUT you cunts.

Holiday camps (Butlin's and the like): an extremely strange British institution whereby people who had served in the First World War, and later in the Second, without experiencing an enforced "holiday" from military service in a prisoner-of-war camp, could nevertheless undergo the same experience as a voluntary holiday from civilian life.

"This is the age of the train": a series of adverts produced in order to give Jimmy Savile an opportunity to peedle Aled Jones.

FUCK'S SAKE AMAZON will you sort out your useless bloody search function so I can search for lead solder and NOT get hundreds of results for fucking lead-free shit. You do have SOME listings for real solder so stop making it so sodding hard to find them.

BIRMINGHAM (SNOW HILL) - CLAPPER IN SNOW HILL TUNNEL: For the purpose of intimating to Enginemen of Down Trains passing through Snow Hill Tunnel that they are nearing the North End of the Tunnel, a Clapper has been fixed on the Down line side about 150 yards from the Snow Hill end of the Tunnel, which is operated by means of a treadle. Every pair of wheels passing over the treadle will sound the Clapper.

Should the Driver of a Down Train notice any defect in the working of the apparatus, he must inform the Station Master or Platform Inspector at Snow Hill station, if necessary stopping specially for the purpose.

(GWR, March 1929 "until further notice".)

If you have a row of 26 toilets labelled in sequence with the letters of the alphabet, and someone pours coloured writing fluid into the water tank of the third one along but not any of the others, then you have an example of inconsistency.

Steam locomotive types for the playground: Glasgow & South Western "Hugh Smellie Big Bogie".

I have just fumigated my shoes with chlorine, to rid them of the fleas picked up walking through my front garden from the vast numbers deposited there by my neighbour's commensurately vast collection of unneutered, continually-breeding, ectoparasite-ridden cats (which she says aren't hers because she is enough of a fucking idiot to think I'm enough of a fucking idiot to accept such a stupid lie). It is interesting to note that the reaction between sodium dichlorotriazinetrione and oxalic acid actually proceeds quite slowly in cold water. Speeds up nicely in hot though.

The moving arsehole shites, and having shat, moves on
Nor all your piety nor wit
Can lure it back to cancel half the pong,
Nor all your tears wash out a turd of it.

Locomotive Magazine, 1944: "Indian Railways: Forty locomotives of the XE type were being built in the U.S.A. They are for the broad gauge and will be known as X Eagle goods engines." Did they have a delta function at three in the morning?

ISLAM IS PEACEFUL. Islam is a religion of peace. It teaches how to settle arguments without conflict.

UK and USA OIL is a religion of war. It teaches the use of military force to sate oil addiction.

Historical references: start with the SYKES-PICOT agreement, the French and British "mandate" or "protectorate" in the Levant, and what happened in the "Middle East" from 1916-1917 or so - World War ONE - up to BEFORE the actual US-Zionist "Israel" thing got set up after WW2. In detail. The two or three "alternative S-P" deals, Britain vs. France in WW1, British deception of the Arabs (Lawrence etc), Irgun and where they went next.

Economic references: World War ONE and its connection with British and American hunger for oil. Royal Navy fuel, Romanian oil in WW1, Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (ie. BP), the US equivalent at the same time, known oilfields at the time in Iraq/Mesopotamia, Arabia, Iran etc, British (and US) operations in Mesopotamia/Middle-East in WW1 and after. Specific historioeconomic texts exist on Oil And WW1.

Contemporary references: US/UK/European news ("white" news, I suppose) is too biased to use (of course). I am told Al Jazeera and other Arabic-ish news sources are at least *better*; I'd treat them myself with less of a pinch of salt, but don't know them well enough to say any more, or to use them myself. You need to scrupulously avoid bias, and of course there is loads of it. But one thing I like to do is look at Islamic websites for Muslims to talk about Muslim things and discuss them among themselves, and compare them with all the "white" discussion sites for talking about "white" things. The Muslims discuss things so calmly and peacefully, nobody goes for anyone else's throat, and they understand that the idea is to get everyone happy with the same information and how it fits together in Islam, so everyone can start from the same "unbiased news sources" (as it were) and take away whatever answers/knowledge are important to them. I think it's beautiful.

I had a personal reason for looking at these sites: to find out what Allah thinks about keeping pigeons. Some people said he deplored it, some people said he approved of it, and it looked contradictory; but it soon became clear that Allah deplores people keeping pigeons if they deliberately abuse them, or use them as wanking material (pigeon racing counts); he approves of people keeping pigeons because they like them as another of Allah's creatures, look after them, respect them etc. Apparently there used to be a major problem in Muslim regions with the deplorable kind, or something, so there are a lot of conspicuous warnings against that and people tend to miss the approving parts - that's what it looked like, but it doesn't matter, the point is it's not the keeping pigeons Allah is concerned about, it's the spirit of how you do it that matters... of course.

And I do like the implication that one of my personal "slogans" that I've been using for years is holy in an Islamic sense (Muslims: I don't want to tread on anyone's toes, so do let me know if you object to this).

Allah says: Be kind to pigeons!

'S fucking weird how common it is for someone to read "Doctor Dolittle" and consider the notion of talking to the animals as an amusing thing to imagine that makes for a good kiddies' story... and then stop there, kind of shake their heads and half-laugh a bit, say "too young for me" or something of the kind, and forget all about it, except perhaps to laugh at how like the name the character was, and indulge in a touch of amused reminiscent scoffing.

I mean what the fuck is up with them; why do they just stop there and think that's all there is? He was a sharp guy, you know, that Hugh Lofting; he wasn't just some nice doddering old buffer writing superficial tales for kids, he put a lot into those books and they "keep on giving", as the saying goes. He wasn't the kind of genial potboiler who didn't care about leaving holes in a book for kids. If he could see that some bit was too obscure for a lot of kids to get it, he didn't just leave them to get puzzled over it, ignore it or whatever and take away the wrong message; he cared about the message, and he took care to use some phrase that would stick in your mind so that when you did find out what it was that you needed to know first, you'd suddenly realise what the phrase was indicating, go "Aha!", and check back over your previous bafflement and go "Yeah! That's what it was! Fucking cool, eh?" or similar. Or for simpler things, he might just stick a simple direct instruction ("go like this", sort of thing) straight into the text, and when you got to understanding what "this" meant you'd understand it automatically. He'd give you a pretty jolly decent chance, basically; he didn't want you to just remain forever baffled, he'd give you a cracker of a clue to let you know when you cottoned on eventually, and if you never do... fair enough maybe you never make it, and that's fine, but if you never do and you give every indication through your observed behaviour that you have no idea you ever might, it becomes clear that you were never capable of understanding it in the first place, so how did you manage to function well enough to get hold of the book at all? It's as if some intelligent space alien came down in a flying saucer and picked up the book at random to find out what Earth culture was all about...

OH FOR FUCK'S SAKE OF COURSE THAT'S WHAT THEY FUCKING ARE

They don't understand how Earth fits together in the first place, they can't communicate with Earth creatures, they can't read Earth books, they don't know what Earth plants are for, they don't know what Earth mineral resources are for, they don't understand what the Earth atmosphere needs by way of maintenance to remain healthy - and they don't care, they can't underst... no, they actively and infectively deny that Earth is perfectly capable of handling simple matters like equitable exchange of value and "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs" fully effectively on its own and not only doesn't need, but ardently desires to avoid, being deliberately fucked around with to prevent us being able to understand it either and forced to use some pointless stupid shite that's never been designed at all and uses one single thing that doesn't even fucking exist for fuck's sake to "compare" the (it's clearer to not use a word here because there is no simple choice that's still clean enough to use) of things in a way that bears no discernible connection with reality whatsoever, but does act with extreme effectiveness to concentrate all the (same not a word) into the control of those who already have the largest accumulations in the first place (having so badly defiled it in the process that it now doesn't exist either) and make sure that everybody else is perpetually kept so desperate that they will orally extract any disgusting bodily fluid of the most purulent kind, willingly upon request, from any orifice/organ/insert as appropriate may happen to tickle the alien's whim, in deathly fear of missing out on the faintest chance of being allowed to keep a bit more for yourself (even though it no longer exists so you never will anyway, the chance of improvement was negligible in the first place, the chance of deterioration was large in the first place and is now very likely larger, and for fuck's sake what fucking chance can you ever have when the alien's only interest in you is as a funny object which you can kick around with varying degrees of force to see what kind of amusing things you can make it do, or turn into a robot and laugh at how good it is at doing the same thing three times a minute in an identical way all day every day without respite for fifty years AND then have some more laughs at what it does when it gets fucked and can't do this thing it's been programmed to do any more but also can't stop trying to do it. Yeah, It's FUCKING OBVIOUS they can't be humans just from the way they find it so entertaining pulling that sort of cunt's stunt on intelligent independently-capable beings, so yeah, if it stomps on you like an alien and laughs at your pain like an alien, then... Get the fuck off our fucking planet and leave us the fuck alone you evil ooze of filthy space shit, you make fucking Unit 731 look like St Francis of Assisi and we are fucking sick to our fucking gonads (amend as applicable) of all your... all your fucking everything you cunts.

And of course there's this fucking film so everyone watches that and never thinks the book'll be worth it because of course that's going to fucking happen, look who made the fucking thing, and the Wikipedia page about Hugh Lofting does make him look just like a nice doddery old buffer so nobody can get a clue that way either and of course it fucking does because all its fucking articles are like that and science and mathematics etc are most definitely included in "all" and for fuck's sake hasn't it been obvious who writes nearly all the internet for fucking forever now already...

Just fuck off and leave us alone you fucking bastard shites. Because if you don't, sooner or later we will figure out some way to make sure you do, and we may or may not like it ourselves but you can be very certain that you will not even know what just happened.

I so wish some form of space patrol would clear all the fucking aliens off this planet and let them go away to somewhere else they can foind a planet that suits them and they suit the planet. What the fuck are they doing here? They clearly don't think it's their home, they don't seem to like it much, and they seem to spend all their time indulging in pointless conflict over incomprehensible things and fomenting similar conflict among the people while they're about it. They don't suit our world, it doesn't suit them, they plainly aren't finding whatever it is they were looking for here and aren't going to find it, and we all just wish they would fuck off to somewhere they do fit in and stop shitting all over our world and fucking it/us up, because we're fucking sick of being fucked up all the time for no reason and on top of that there are so many of the bastards cluttering/fucking the place up these days that we can hardly find any other people to hang out with any more (and if we do find any they've often been so fucked up by these fucking aliens all over the place that we don't really get on properly anyway). For fuck's sake.

Bing: it's very nice when you have a picture of the Skelligs as the day's background image, but for FUCK'S sake can't you find something better to talk about in the caption than FUCKING STAR WARS? Chicken's tits...

"Fourteen steps to nowhere carved in solid stone"

FUCK YOU GMAIL and your stupid fucking DKIM bollocks. Fucking blocking every fucking email I try to send to all my friends who are too ignorant to avoid using your shite service. Fucking well turn it off again you pains in the fucking arse.

Well there's interesting then: Snails like sticky labels. I've just found a parcel left outside, wrapped in a plastic bag with a sticky paper address label on it. And a snail had crawled over the plastic bag, until it got to the edge of the sticky label, whereupon it stopped crawling and proceeded to chew about a 1cm x 3cm chunk out of the label. I wonder how much more of it it would have eaten if I hadn't come along when I did.

It really is high time we fucked off this lunar calendar shite and FIXED THE DATE OF EASTER DOWN. Fuck having it dotting back and forth over a two month range according to some bollocks timescale they made up x thousand years ago because it's the best they could manage back then. What the fuck is the point? It's nowt but a pain in the bloody arse. Just redefine it to a fixed date in the timescale we use now for every other bloody thing, for fuck's sake. Make it always the first Sunday in April, say, which is a sensible time to have it and is about the middle of the current range. That way we'd always know when to expect it instead of always having to piss around looking it up and getting caught out by it suddenly happening unexpectedly.

ONSEMI you useless bastards. All the pages on your website get served with the mime type "application/octet-stream" instead of what they really are. So the fucking browser does not know what to do with them and you get the open/save dialogue instead of seeing the bloody page. Sort it out you cunts.

Why does the 74HC244 lack Schmitt inputs when both the 74LS244 and the CD/HEF40244 do have them?

It's Winston Churchill! How have I only just realised this?

The captain of the Golgafrinchan "B" Ark is Winston Churchill. During the few months that Churchill did actually have to go to France and serve on the Western Front in WW1, the bit he didn't manage to get out of, he took along with him his own special private horse-drawn wagon, which contained not only an actual proper bath but also a coal-fired boiler to heat the water for it. So while everyone else was shivering in the mud in whatever wretched camp or insanitary French farmhouse they found themselves spending the night in, Churchill was inside his special wagon, stewing himself in a nice hot bath and handing round jynnan tonnyx to people. And providing Douglas Adams with source material. Fuck me, the fit is perfect.

Why is it, that whenever I read a sentence like "He went to her and lifted her face by placing a hand under her chin", it is NEVER followed by something like "She promptly hauled off and socked him one. He staggered back, blood streaming from his nose"?

"Psychotic mindfuckers rape thalidomide children - then mutilate them!" Written on a gatepost opposite an establishment which educated some of the current Conservative party, in the 1970s.

The one next door was "Clit House".

How do you Czechoslovakia?

"The costing model found that preventative engineering would be less cost-effective than maintenance and delay costs over both 20 year and 50 year lifespans", say these buggers.

Translation: Rather than take the trouble to fix dodgy railway embankments that might fall down, properly, and so make sure they don't, they're just going to bodge them up in patches as and when bits do start to fall down, and happily pay the fines when it makes the trains late. For 50 years.

I DON'T GIVE A FUCK WHAT THE FUCKING "COSTING MODEL" SAYS. THIS IS SHIT.

What kind of FUCKING IDIOT do you have to be to read an explanation of the term "Lord Bellend's [Infrastructure Feature]" as being a generic name for any structure or building that only got built to try and bribe some rich cunt into ceasing to act the wanker over something, and then actually expect to be able to look up things like "Lord Bellend's Viaduct" USING THOSE EXACT WORDS on a map???!!?

And what kind of absolute nutcase do you have to be to get so freaked out over not being able to find it that you make an official complaint about having been able to read it in the first place? Come to that, what sort of receiver of official complaints do you have to be to take such a moronic complaint seriously and pass it on instead of throwing it straight in the fucking bin?

Fuck me ragged the fucking state of some people. I mean for fuck's sake I'm not even making this up. Chicken's tits. He probably thinks you can find all the ships that have been repaired so much that every part has been replaced several times by looking up "Theseus" under "Owner" on the shipping register as well.

ATTENTION LES CONS FRANÇAIS: Allez-vous faire foutre et vos livraisons manquées.

The British flag has (very nearly) rotational symmetry of order 4. Can you think of another flag that has that, kids?

A nanogram is a very small word with the letters jumbled up.

"2000 lbs. Torque". FOR FUCK'S SAKE. This is supposed to be part of the specification for a helical torsion spring. And it's FUCKING USELESS. 2000lbs at what radius? And what angle of deflection is required to give that increment of torque? And what's this fucking imperial shite anyway? I'm looking for a figure in NEWTON-METRES PER DEGREE, or some equivalent unit. Fucking stupid bastards. If they don't describe their fucking springs in units that actually make sense and have the same dimensions as the quantity being described then I'm NOT GOING TO FUCKING BUY THEM, am I, because I don't know what the fuck they really are. Moronic bloody cunts.

The hoopiest place in Wales is here. That's a village that really knows where its towel is.

Fuck the Tories. And fuck privatisation too.

Look at this fucking shite. Britain's electricity prices are going through the roof, with households unable to pay bills and businesses going bust left right and centre. That's all in the news. But what a surprise that THIS fucking well isn't...

The bastard fucking Tories are blithering and doing fuck all in public, while behind the scenes they and their precious fucking privatised energy wankers are coining it in by flogging electricity overseas via the undersea interconnector cables, in unprecedentedly huge amounts. Most of those cables were their cheap-arsed cheating method of "going green and keeping prices low" by not bothering to build nuclear and renewable generating stations, but just grabbing electricity from other countries so the carbon dioxide emissions from generating it don't count as British. Now things are difficult they are using them to make the problem worse and rip us off. Which of course they fucking are because the Tories flogged off half our energy supply infrastructure to the countries the electricity is going to, and then spent several years pissing them off as much as they possibly could. Where's Guy Fawkes when you need him eh?

What do you call an Irishman living in South Wales? Murph O'Tudful.

If Titan was in a retrograde orbit then it would be called Loosen.

WHY is it so FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE to find SPICE models on the fucking internet?

The 555 really ought to win some kind of award for "really popular and useful chip with the most piss-awkward pin layout ever". No matter which of the very wide variety of possible configurations you're trying to wire it up in, there are always several pins which are a pain in the arse to get them to go where you want them to go - and since there only are 8 pins and quite often you're only connecting 7 of them, that is quite an impressive piece of shit.

It is something of a disappointment to find that Google Translate renders "Romanes eunt domus" as "Romans Go Home" and not as "People called Romanes they go the house".

ARGOS: what the cunting fuck is the point of you even having any kind of website at all?

Access Denied
You don't have permission to access "http://www.argos.co.uk/" on this server.
Reference #18.a051702.1647724495.4c143b3

You stupid fucking bastards.

Why do Amazon have to make it so FUCKING HARD to communicate anything to them at all? I've just tried to update my delivery instructions to tell them where to leave stuff if I'm out. Turns out I can't bloody do it. All you get is a fixed list of crappy preset options. Neither of the places I want to tell them match any of the preset options, and none of the preset options are any bloody good. And there is no fucking TEXT FIELD to let you type in something that isn't on the shitty fucking list. For fuck's sake.

I wish Cloudflare would just fuck off and stop existing.

A thieving cunt is more formally referred to as a "quiminal".

What the fuck is this stupid bleeding "Premiere" bollocks on youtube? Far as I can see all it does is tell you a video is there when actually it fucking isn't and all it achieves is to piss everyone who tries to watch it off.

Curzon Street is NOT a good place to put a railway station.

It's a SHIT place to put a railway station. For fuck's sake, the Victorians abandoned it in the first place because they realised how shit it was as soon as they started trying to use it. They went to all the difficulty of building New Street precisely because Curzon Street was shit.

And it's still shit. It's just as shit as it always was. It hasn't somehow suddenly become "convenient" or "central" just because the people who abandoned it because it wasn't either convenient or central have been dead a long time. Nor has it magically become a potential "good interchange" with New Street. It's a fucking useless interchange with New Street. It's fucking miles away.

No, it's NOT a "myth" that it's miles away. Even if it apparently has become fashionable now to call it a myth among all the stupid bastards who favour HS2 and so find themselves obliged to create a constant stream of tortuous sophistries to help themselves ignore all the obvious reasons why it's shit. I've fucking walked it, for fuck's sake. It IS bleeding miles away. You trog on and on for fucking ever. The idea of turning it into an "interchange" is just fucking stupid. Oh, and it's uphill coming back as well.

Curzon Street is just as shit now as it has been well known to be for about 180 years and don't let any cunt tell you different.

In days of yore, when bums were sore, and toilets weren't invented,
They defecated on the floor, until they went demented.

Snow resembles dogshit. It's not brown and it's not smelly but in its own way it's just as fucking undesirable a substance.

So this character's name is Arthur Carr. I shall henceforth refer to him as Bike.

"It's my parlour lodger, Miss Mybus", she said, "a most respectable lady."

THREE DAYS' WORK and 500 lines of fucking code to get rid of the stupid fucking shite "Bootstrap Darkroom" theme some complete fucking moron has broken the previously very good "Changing Face of Worcester" website with and make it go back to how it used to be before they broke it. FUCK'S SAKE. What the cunting fuck did they break it for? There was fuck all wrong with the original "p0w0" theme and it was very usable and made it very easy to find stuff on the site. The useless fucking "Bootstrap Darkroom" theme is completely fucking unusable: all you get is about five lines of text in a ridiculously huge font and you can't even fucking see anything let alone explore the site. Stupid fucking cunts.

(Note, in case anyone from Changing Face of Worcester reads this: I would have made "Changing Face of Worcester" a link to your site in days gone by, but there's no fucking point now you've fucked it up because no bugger can bleeding well use it any more without my code and my browser to run it in.)

JAMES MITCHELL HEWITT, mechanical engineer and managing director of the Saver Clutch Co. of Altrincham, in the course of a journey from Manchester to London by the Midland route, on 25th February 1918, died at Darley Dale of falling down the loo.

The Guardian for 28th February 1918 reports a different and rather more confused conclusion. They say: "At a Darley Dale inquest yesterday on James Mitchell Hewitt, consulting engineer, of Hale, who was killed on the Midland Railway on Monday, night, a verdict of accidental death was returned. Hewitt left Manchester on an express train for London, and the coroner said lie must nave opened a wrong door and been tnrown out on to the line." Oh, ar? Who tnrew him out then? Doesn't sound like a very accidental death to me...

(Though they do then immediately go on to say: "The wife of the Munich sctflntor. Rotheri burger, threw her two children, aeed" seven and four, out of a window, and then jumped after tnem. ah tnree are dead." I suppose Frau Rotheri burger was on her way home from a family visit to Manchester for a spot of sctflnting and got so much fun out of chucking James Mitchell Hewitt out of the door (or down the loo, possibly) that she couldn't restrain herself from taking the idea to ridiculous extremes.)

Russian railway interests in Kent: the Romney Ivan Dymchurch railway.

Too many dimwitted people pretend to being "green" but are nevertheless implacably opposed to atomic energy. This is silly. Surely if the environment is being damaged by old smoky power stations it's really obvious that we need to build new clear ones instead.

Badly paid people are said to earn peanuts. Anna Mae Bullock can be said to earn teanuts.

The island of Madeira is so named from the terrible number of shipwrecks that used to happen there. Time and again some chap whose son had gone to sea would put down his morning newspaper and say to his wife, "My dear, a terrible thing has happened..."

Fog is a meteorological phenomenon with two wives.

Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more
Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,
I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude,
And with forced fingers rude
Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.
Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear,
Compels me to disturb your season due:

For Lycidas is dead! Oh no! What are we going to do?
He used to think he's Elvis; then he died just like him too
The fat sod had a heart attack while sitting on the loo
And then he fell against the door so no-one could get through

It was his wife who found him, and she gave a dreadful shout
And we had to break the door down so we could get him out
And then we held his funeral, and that went up the spout
The coffin fell out of the hearse going round a roundabout

"It's split the thing right open!" his wife cried with a wail
And the stink that wafted out of it was something worse than stale
We had to patch it up with bits of roofing felt and nails
And then we found a pub to wash our dusty throats with ale

And a voice came from the coffin protesting "I'm not dead!"
We pulled the nails out again, and saw 'twas as he said
But by now we'd had enough of this; we hit him on the head
And chucked him in the river and we all went home to bed.

(And Milton came along the bank, and said, "Well, here's a do;
I've only just found Edward King, now here's old Lyco too!
I'll fish 'em out for compost; ought to make a quid or two
From flogging it to fertilise fresh woods and pastures new.")

The Inverness-Kyle of Lochalsh railway was, at one time, proposed for electrification, using the 750V DC third rail system as it was considered that overhead wires would not survive the winter storms. The proposal never came to anything, but the aspiration is still commemorated in the well-known song, "Oh for DC to Skye".

How is it that these days "fitness model" appears to mean a woman who is quite normal and attractive down to the waist, but then has an absolutely GIGANTIC arse that would be oversize for two normal women and looks utterly fucking grotesque? And then takes close-up pictures of it using a wide angle lens so it looks even worse? It's like some genetic engineer has managed to somehow hybridise flesh and rubber in order to breed in Moreau style a novel species which is a kind of female humanoid with a built-in spacehopper.

A frigate is a type of fighting ship designed for the kind of battles where the opponents turn out to be better fighters than they look. So you attack them with apparently appropriate smaller ships to begin with and spend all day getting nowhere and eventually say "This isn't working, is it. Frig it, we'll send the big one in." And the enemy captain who by now is running out of powder anyway looks and sees this great big thing coming along and throws up his hands and goes "Ah, frig it".

It is interesting the way several places around the English coast are named after significant qualities to be found in the local environment. So for instance we have Sheerness, which is mostly vertical; and Sharpness, where there are loads of brambles and gorse and thistles and things; and the less said about Foulness the better.

The French have some, too. They call them "caps". They spell them a bit funny, it is true, but that is only because they are French. So the cap Grisnez is full of whinging babies, and Blancnez has no discernible characteristics whatsoever.

I'm still not sure what a dunge is, though.

What is this stupid bollocks about train drivers now being instructed to sound only the low tone of the horn at whistle boards? IF YOU DON'T SOUND BOTH TONES IT DOESN'T SOUND LIKE A TRAIN. It could be a lorry or a car or a football fan with a foghorn or some other variety of tit. But not a train. If you want people to watch out for a train coming then sound both tones. They'll know what it is then and know where to look. If you only sound one tone they will be looking at the road and in their rear view mirror and at other things around them and basically at anything but the railway, wondering what the fuck that noise was. So if you don't sound both tones you'd do better not to bother at all really.

And it can't be to not annoy people living near the line because they don't just do it around houses, they do it everywhere, including out in the middle of nowhere with no houses around for miles. In any case they don't really care about not annoying people otherwise they would refuse to install one of those bloody awful howling wailing level crossings within half a mile of anyone's house. And that's another thing. How the fuck does it happen that when they install one of those right on someone's doorstep the howly waily bit ever continues to function for longer than it takes to pop out to the nearest DIY warehouse? Do people not know about squirty cans of expanding polyurethane foam? The things are ridiculously fucking loud even inside a passing train and you only get them for the few seconds it takes to pass. When they're right outside your house they start several minutes before a train appears and go on screeching for bleeding ages, every time a train comes past. What the fuck is wrong with people that they are so flaming pathetic and complaisant that they don't do something effective about the bastard thing the first opportunity they get?

And no, the fucking horrendous racket is not "necessary for safety" or any of that fucking shite. If someone is so blind they can't see all those bloody disco lights they aren't going to take any notice of the fucking noise either. Because they won't be there because they won't be able to drive. And there's another thing. What the fuck is the point of having all that crazy mad flashing shit instead of plain ordinary traffic lights that everyone knows and understands? We've already got a perfectly good standard signal for telling traffic to go or stop so stick to the fucking standard instead of trying to set off everyone's latent epilepsy. There's one in the middle of the Northampton ring road which is even worse because there isn't even a fucking level crossing there, so you see this thing and wonder what the fuck it's doing there and did there use to be a level crossing once but they've torn it up and haven't got round to taking down the disco lights yet. It's actually there to let fire engines charge out of the fire station without looking but how the fuck is anyone unfamiliar with the area supposed to know that because it just looks like a particularly silly mistake, which means it actually is one.

THE SALAD CAROL: "O come lettuce adore Him..."

Apparently the LNWR's design for electrically operated semaphore signals used a solenoid, operating at 220V with 8A pull-in current and 2A holding current. So the whole time the signal was "off" this thing was sat up there inside its little cast-iron box dissipating 440W with only dubious conduction for cooling. How the fuck did it not melt itself?

I don't know what you're selling and I don't care. I just want you to fuck off.

Why do chippies put signs in the window proudly announcing that they are "now frying new potatoes"? Chips made with new potatoes are fucking horrible. They're just soft and slightly soapy-textured corpse-white sticks of hot starch. There's no interesting taste to them and there sure as fuck isn't even a suggestion of a crisply-fried yellow/brown layer on the outside, so they hardly count as actually cooked at all, they've just been heated enough to go soft. What the chippies are effectively doing with those proud announcements is saying to prospective customers "Don't come here, our chips are shit".

Midland Railway trains in the 1870s had huge blood-red sightless balls. It's official. History of the line written at the time says it's true.

Gyms are for people who are too stupid to realise that you can stay at home and spend all day knackering yourself out if you want to without paying a penny for it.

East Midlands Parkway railway station, says Wikipedia, is "one of the greenest stations built in the United Kingdom", because it uses a ground-source heat pump for its central heating.

Bollocks. It's right next door to a fucking massive power station. Like, literally right on the other side of the fence. They do not need ANY kind of complex system that consumes energy to scarf up low-grade environmental heat and uses that to reduce its consumption for a given output. All they need to do is run a fucking pipe through the fence and scrounge some tiny fraction of the waste heat that the power station is trying to chuck away up its eight enormous cooling towers. That way they wouldn't even have a consumption.

Also, it's in the middle of fucking nowhere. It's roughly equidistant between Derby, Nottingham and Loughborough, all of which have already got their own stations, and a good ten miles or more from any of them. You can hardly call it "green" when people can't even get to it without doing a ten mile drive (and then another ten mile drive back again) instead of just using the existing stations on their own fucking doorstep.

Then on top of that it is used as the road-to-rail transfer point for what must be one of the most amazingly fucking stupid examples of pointless transport facilities spawned by the idiocy of capitalism: fucking bus services from places like Hull, York, Doncaster, Bradford, Huddersfield and so on - which again have already got their own railway stations, of course - to East Midlands Parkway, where the passengers change onto a train and carry on to London. For no fucking reason at all except to divert the fucking money they pay for their tickets away from outfits that actually run trains for the whole distance and give it instead to an outfit that doesn't. I mean who the fuck even wants to grind half way from somewhere like York to London on a fucking bus and then change to a train instead of just zipping down the ECML all the way? Trouble is there are enough fucking idiots in the world that no matter how bleeding stupid your idea is some twats will still be even more stupid and give you money for it.

So fuck off with this "one of the greenest stations" shite. It wastes energy for its central heating by deliberately ignoring the ginormous amounts of waste heat being chucked into the sky only a couple of hundred metres' pipe run away, and it encourages people to stop using the trains that already go all the way and instead cover the first ten or hundred miles of their journeys by road. And this is supposed to be "green"? Fuck off.

People making videos using those shitey "Gopro" cameras or clones/imitations thereof: CHANGE THE FUCKING LENS. The standard lens they come with is FUCKING SHITE. Its spherical distortion is APPALLING and every flaming straight line in the scene comes out bent and looks bleeding stupid. And it gets even worse when things move and the closer they come to the camera the more bent they get. On top of that they fuck up the perspective so things look further away than they really are and you can't tell how fast anything is really moving either. Proper lenses that do not distort the image are cheap and easy to find and it is a piece of piss to swap them over and chuck the stupid bendy thing in the bin so FUCKING WELL DO IT.

So this book, written something over a hundred years ago, has been going on about this character on every page since nearly the beginning, and has managed quite easily to convey that regardless of what kind of day she's been having she still compulsively fucks like a rabbit every single night; yet we are almost half way through the book before it finally makes it clear that she has a truly stupendously massive pair of tits.

"Venusian"? Who the fuck ever came up with that abomination? It's VENERIAN, you tits. Yes, it reminds you of "venereal disease". That's because it's the same fucking word. You insist on naming shit after a Roman goddess, you get to take the rough with the smooth.

Print out a bunch of stickers that say THEY THINK PEOPLE WON'T NOTICE THIS SH and use them to improve the accuracy of the labelling of the fake butter in your local supermarket.

Inigo Jones, the renowned architect, was a contemporary of the demolition expert, Outyoucome Smith.

Jesuits like to drive top of the range Mercedeses with AMDG badges on the boot.

Someone round here appears to be hitting a rusty iron plate with a coal hammer in such a way as to produce a very loud and metallic imitation of a jackdaw.

BRICKBATS. What the fuck actually are these things? People in books throw them, or occasionally get hit on the head by them, but it is never clear what they are. What is the significance of taking the perfectly ordinary and understandable word "brick" and sticking this fucking BAT bit on the end of it? Does it just mean a brick, with a meaningless suffix stuck on the end just to confuse people? Or does it mean half a brick, in which case why not just bleeding say "half a brick", instead of inventing some silly alternative way to say it that fails to convey the meaning? Or does it mean something stupidly improbable like a cricketing implement designed for hitting spherical bricks with? Or what?

VANIA is a type of American pencil.

So there is this character called Eunice and I have done a global search and replace to change the spelling to Unis because it is more entertaining that way.

Who the fuck is Nicole Richie, and why should some spammer expect me to give a toss about her approval of some unknown thing?

Yes, you can certainly make a frock out of wool, but you must be sure to build a lighthouse on it so it doesn't sink ships.

So this character's explanation for how she suddenly lost all her hair is to stand up and say: "I was washing my hair in petrol and it caught fire". And absolutely no other fucker even blinks, or gives any sign at all that they think this is anything other than a perfectly normal thing to do and setting fire to your head is just one of those irritating annoyances you have to put up with. Or even, for that matter, says "so where the fuck are all the scars then" or calls her the girl with the asbestos epidermis or anything.

(The author makes a point of telling us that all the potentially implausible-sounding phenomena and procedures he refers to, he has personally tested by doing the experiment and verifying that they do in fact work as described. But I bet he didn't bloody try that one.)

There is a character in this book whose name is Ted Chown and I can't help calling him Ted Chmod.

Punctuation in software is a pain in the arse. You're trying to figure out someone else's code in some horrible language and it keeps using some construction which looks like {{$:$:[@]}}({}) and it's all over the place and it's in important places where you can't just ignore it for now and come back when other things have made it obvious. So now what the fuck? It looks like line noise. You can't put {{$:$:[@]}}({}) into a search engine and get anything useful out. You have this fucking impossible problem, viz: There is this... fucking thing. Fuck knows what it is. It's just "the thing you do by typing {{$:$:[@]}}({})"; that's how you do it, but what the fuck do you call it when you want to talk about it? Especially to a search engine? And this is a cunt.

(I will admit that I did once get pissed off enough to do a search for javascript stupid fucking arrow shit as a last resort. Fuck me if it didn't give me the actual answer. But this is definitely not the normally expected result. The term arrow turns out to be actually quite distinctive, and something like square round curly brackets dollar colon at would indubitably not be.)

Armies of ghosts have the problem that insubstantial spectral weapons just go straight through normal people, and similarly the ghosts themselves aren't solid enough to use normal weapons instead. So they have to have special training to enable them to manifest greater solidity. For this reason, they are known as soliders.

Who was Bess, and why did she go and live miles and miles from all the other Arabs on the other side of the Black Sea?

Crown Prince Wilhelm, and his chief of staff, Schmidt the knobless dwarf.

Fuck this "illusive" shit. What the fuck do you mean? Are you trying to write "elusive" but you can't bloody spell, or do you mean "illusory" but you're too bleeding thick to know what the proper word is? Talk proper, like I does.

(...in case you're wondering, this is the wanker and this is the cunt.)

Lord Chatham with his sabre drawn
Said "Where the fuck's this wanker Strachan?"
Sir Richard, longing to be at 'em,
Said "Where the fuck's this cunt Lord Chatham?"

A long time ago, before cocktails and skateboards and John Travolta, we had a king named, with uncompromising bluntness, Cunt. His son, though, was a more ambiguous figure. Historians are divided over whether he was only half a cunt, or hardly a cunt at all.

Wankers who send me spam from people who are dead can FUCK RIGHT OFF.

What do you call a Welsh diver?

Danny Dwr.

WHO put the preset inputs down one side of the 4569 the other way round from those down the other side? You confusing fucking cunt. And I didn't even bloody notice until I'd wired it up with both the same way round and it gave the wrong answer. Fucksake.

The Goose Step: What the fuck is it with fascist nations and similar cunts that they always insist on marching in this ridiculous manner? Do they really not realise what a bunch of fucking clowns it makes them look?

Reminder that Tory support did NOT massively increase in the 2019 election, 80 seat majority be blowed. In reality the level of support for the Tories was exactly (ie. within 1%) the fucking same as the previous election. The same fucking number of people bothered to vote at all, and the same fucking number of those people voted for the Tories. The only reason they went from barely able to function to having an 80 seat majority is that the British electoral system is a giant fucking pile of shite which totally fails at being anywhere near representative. And the establishment as a whole is fucking bent which is why there was no mention at all of this fact at the time and certainly fuck all awareness of it now.

Gulls are birds, as a rule; C-gulls are birds, and E-gulls are also birds. But B-gulls are dogs. This is very strange.

03333 050466 again: There are now more references to this number showing up than there were a few days ago. ALL of them are people wondering whether it's a scam or not. So the fuckers are obviously persistent. Some of them are people claiming it's actually something genuine from the NHS. Yeah, right. So how come the search engines don't find ANY results on the NHS official website. How come NONE of these suckers who think it's real can provide any convincing evidence, ie. a link to a page on nhs.gov.uk that says it's real. How come some of them are saying it told them they were going to get a government food parcel which never turned up. How come it was a doctor's website (even if it was fucked) that was the only thing I could find about it originally and that said it was a scam and they ought to fucking know. And how come it's from one of these stupid fucking numbers that you can't look up except on sites for scam numbers because no fucker uses them if they aren't running a fucking scam and trying to hide who they really are. Of course it's a fucking scam. "Government food parcel", for fuck's sake, no bleeding wonder it never turned up, who the fuck believes THIS government would be doing that, this is the government that wanted to just take no fucking notice and do nothing and let everyone die, and the only reason they are doing anything is that one of them was actually fucking stupid enough to tell the newspapers they were just going to let everyone die and left them having to frantically try and convince everyone he didn't mean it before we strung all the cunts up from lamp posts.

Fucking Imperial shite - What the fuck is this shit with steel stock sizes? I'm looking for metric tube and almost all I can find is tube with the dimensions quoted in millimetres but they are just converted to millimetres from the same old range of piss fucking awkward silly Imperial sizes. Which don't fit ANYTHING except other bits of tube because everything that isn't tube is proper metric these days. So why the fuck hasn't steel stock gone proper metric years ago like every other fucking thing did?

"POS Male Series Rod End Bearings ( M3 - M30 Right Hand Thread )", says the heading of the ebay listing. Yeah, right, but I don't want POS ones, I want good ones...

03333 050466 SCAM Some bunch of cunts on this number are running a scam to do with coronavirus. For some reason the only reference I can find to this on Google is a headline which is supposed to show up on a doctor's website but the website is fucked so although the comment is present in the page source it doesn't actually appear on the fucking screen. Anyway they are saying 03333 050466 is a SCAM and if they call you don't give any personal details. So this is an additional comment from me that does appear on the fucking screen and I am saying that 03333 040566 is a CORONAVIRUS SCAM and if they call you tell them to go and fuck themselves.

Amusing OCR Errors Not Caught By Spellcheck: "Hitler" rendered as "Hider". Well, it's accurate; he did. He hid in a hole in the ground and shot himself, and there was much rejoicing.

"...and officers adopting a relaxed attitude to discipline. Several men had even been shot for refusing to follow orders." When the officers were not relaxed, men who refused to follow orders could expect to be disembowelled and hung on the wire, or staked out to be eaten by rats.

Is it really too much to expect people to read over what they've just written at least well enough to catch the really mindbuggeringly obvious pieces of stupidity?

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norman Juster. WHY THE FUCK is it that, having never even thought about it since I was a kid, in the last couple of months or so I seem to have encountered yet another bugger waffling on about how great it was nearly every other day? It's like some cunt has been noting down all the websites I visit and then going back in time five or ten years or whatever and making sure the authors blurge crap about The Phantom Tollbooth on the pages I'm going to visit.

Well they can all fuck off because THEY ARE ALL WRONG ANYWAY. It wasn't "great" or "wonderful" or any of those things; as for "magical" I suppose it was in a sense, but there are a lot of possible senses and it's not necessarily a complimentary description. In any case, such lyricism is wasted on it when a more suitable phrase of short and earthy nature better serves the cause of accuracy: The Phantom Tollbooth is a pile of shite. It's full of shit puns and stupid deliberately contrary situations and it can fuck right off with the relentless fucking preaching and how-to-be-a-good-little-boy fucking bollocks which is somewhat less subtle than a brick and I can't imagine how any kid could possibly read it and not get pissed off unless they were a stuck up little prig. I can't remember who gave me my copy, but I can remember the experience of reading it: it was like really fucking obvious that they'd chosen it as a vehicle to nag at me at second hand under the guise of giving me a present, and the passage of time has increased my vocabulary such that I now have the words to express what I then felt, ie. "yeah, and you can get fucked too", not just the once but repeated every couple of pages or so every time there's another shit preachy bit.

Ebay people: DON'T just put the manufacturer's model number in your listing and tell people (or imply) that they can google it if they want more information. Because from that moment onwards absolutely the only fucking thing any cunt searching for that number will now ever find until the heat death of the universe is endless copies of your fucking listing on all the different ebay national sites, and on all the stupid sites that copy ebay, and then later on all the really shit sites that copy out of date ebay listings off the stupid ebay-copying sites, and so on and so on in endless duplication and basically what you have just done is made it impossible for any cunt ever to know any fucking thing at all about that item except that once upon a time someone sold one on ebay, whoop de bloody do. You tit.

Lacrosse is not a game. It's a military training exercise from the First World War. The corps lacroissiers were developed in response to the French army's persistent difficulties in getting a good supply of reliable grenades: the idea was that instead of arming the soldiers with their own grenades, they could simply be trained to catch grenades thrown by the enemy and sling them back where they came from, using scoop-nets attached to their rifles like bayonets. It was about as successful as many brilliant military ideas of WW1.

CUNTLESS CATTLE: a reimagining of the principle of the removable control panel for car stereos by dairy farmers at risk from cattle thieves. A release mechanism operated by twisting the horns in opposite directions unlatches the cunt, allowing it to be removed when not in use and stored in a cave or shed. DNA coding ensures that the cunts only work with the cow they were born with. In the cuntless state, the cattle cannot be bred and thus their milk production cycle cannot be restarted, rendering them unattractive targets for theft by other dairy farmers.

IDEA: convert some Chinese frying pans into guitars and start a wok band.

KHYPERMEDIA CDRs SUCK. I have just finished copying all my CDs onto the PC, and they all worked fine - EXCEPT THESE FUCKING THINGS.

I have five of these useless pieces of junk. ALL of them are completely unreadable. cdparanoia retries endlessly without result, and occasionally segfaults. The CD drive throws SCSI errors trying to read them. Etc. Whereas all the other miscellaneous CDRs I have were all readable without problems.

So fuck KHypermedia CDRs, they are SHIT.

So, Google doesn't seem to know that that Fleetwood Mac album is called KANGO IN THE NIGHT.

Ode to the Rocking Horse Commode (with thanks to @marnanel for the inspiration)

I bet they don't make rocking horse commodes,
Although they might be a tremendous boon
To one who has a need to dump their load
On shipboard, where there is no "smallest room".
The vessel, as it rocks upon the waves,
Is certain to upset a normal po,
And most are not so agile, nor so brave,
To balance on the gunwale when they go:
To clutch the shrouds, precariously half-nude,
And wonder how it ever came to this,
Straining to finish ere some billow lewd
Should favour one with great Poseidon's kiss.
So let me perch on rockers, give to me
That inverse-pendulum stability.

Amesbury poisoning incident: This is a screenshot of the tweet from @SwindonFireRDS with the photo of a support truck attending the poisoning of Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley. I am reposting it here because the original tweet has been deleted to support the moronic attempt to deceive the public into believing this was a nerve agent attack. I'm amazed that people are stupid enough to believe that, but then I'm always amazed how stupid the things people believe are, and the government are undoubtedly counting on that. It was flaming bloody obvious from the first official reports on the Skripal incident that it was fuck all to do with the Russian government, after all; no need to have been "influenced by Russian propaganda", the conclusion follows inevitably from reading only the British propaganda and observing what a fatuous load of obvious bollocks it is.

The tweet text is: 77 mile round trip for our Operational Support Unit last night to Amesbury. Thankfully the incident wasn't serious and our decontamination shower wasn't required.

The text accompanying the photo itself is: Incident at Amesbury's Archers Gate - 8.56pm 30th June 2018 - Updated 9.48am (I think) 1st July 2018

An incident in the Kings Gate area of Amesbury on Saturday evening (June 30th) is thought to have been a drug-related medical episode.

More than 10 emergency vehicles arrived on the scene from police, ambulance and fire service.

A number of roads around the estate were closed for a time, but re-opened within a couple of hours.

[Small photo of housing estate with barrier of police tape] [Large photo of what appears to be a 26t 6x2 curtain-side lorry with a forklift on the back although cropped so you can't actually see the forklift itself, in red with signwriting "Fire & Rescue Service" "Operational Support"]

7:48 AM - 1 Jul 2018

I thought this classic Viz postcard could do with being a bit easier to find:

Stupid House Shit from an advert in the local paper which I happened to see just before I wiped my arse on it... Some tit is selling a house for 250k-odd and describing it as "an investment" because you can rent it out for what comes to about 5k a year after tax. This is supposed to be bloody great, for some reason.

FUCKSAKE. 5k is 1/50th of 250k. You CAN'T FUCKING DO THIS unless you've already had 5k a year that you don't know what to do with for 50 fucking years so you've been able to accumulate 250k in the first place. And if you do happen to have 250k just lying around, unless you expect to live for more than 50 years then it's more than 5k a year just spending it. So basically it works out that either you spend most of your life trying to pile up 250k and pissing it all up the wall just before you die, or having 250k already and throwing it in a hole and taking a bit back each year so there's still a lot left when you die and that lot is wasted, or somewhere in between the two. Either way it's a fucking stupid way of wasting all or most of 250k just so you can feel like a property magnate or whatever moronic attraction it is that this idiotic behaviour has for people.

And all these fucking "investment" things are like this, whether they're about houses or not. You need a metric shitload of money that takes most of your life to accumulate before you can even start, and you get a comparative dribble back so that you're bound to be dead before it amounts to more than a fraction of what you wasted on it in the first place, so there is just no fucking point doing it at all. What the fuck is it with people? Do they actually genuinely not understand that they are going to die and therefore simply don't realise they're never going to get back most of what they put in, or is it just that having fuckloads of times more money than you know what to do with causes your brain to degenerate so you do really stupid things with it? And if it's the latter why don't they at least find something beneficially stupid to do with it, like going up in a balloon and scattering notes over the town or something? Fucking thick bastard rich cunts or what.

Christians, Muslims, and Jews, we may differ on the details, but we all believe in the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. Therefore we should sort out the mess left by British/French/Ottoman imperialism in peace and unity under the same God. Not fight over it.

Amusing Diesel Memory: a Lister-Petter AD1, driving a generator. "It's getting a bit hot", they said. It was, rather - exhaust glowing red...

Turned out what had happened was some cack had got into the sump, and been drawn into the oil pump. This promptly seized solid and chewed the teeth off its drive gear. The chewed-off teeth then got carried round into the next driven gear round, and smashed that up too. That was the governor drive. So the governor thought the engine wasn't moving, and not only did it wind the fuelling up to maximum, but once the engine had been stopped and started again it never even clicked off the excess-fuel starting setting. And there the thing was going like absolute stink, pumping in as much fuel as it possibly could, and with no forced lubrication. No idea how fast it was going - when I put a rev counter to it it was off the scale. No wonder it was getting a bit hot.

Amazingly, it needed remarkably little doing to it. Obviously the oil pump and smashed gears needed replacing, and also the governor drive shaft which had got bent, but there was very little on top of that. Just cleaning out all the bits of metal and replacing the shell bearings (and if you were a total fucking cheapskate you might even have got away with reusing them, at least for a little while). Bloody tough things those engines. If only the cowling was as robust as the insides...

STUPID TV SHIT: having the reporters who present the news from Parliament actually physically standing outside the bloody place. Shouting to make themselves heard over the traffic noise and the wind blowing into the microphone, and quite likely in the pissing rain as well. WHAT THE FUCK IS THE FUCKING POINT? Just get the poor sods to say their words inside the studio like the rest of the news presenters do. That way you can hear them properly and it's also a fuck of a lot easier than having the reporter plus camera crew and equipment trog all the way to the HP to make a shitty recording in the rain. And if they must have the HP as a backdrop they can always fucking bluescreen it in for fuck's sake. Like, in fact, they always used to do before they got this fucking stupid idea. Twats.

BURPUT? Where the fuck is Burput? It's Bridport, apparently. It doesn't say this on Google. Well, it will now.

Why So Frail? ...I am referring to people in old books. Victorian books, mostly, although twentieth-century books also feature instances of the phenomenon, with decreasing frequency as date of authorship advances.

Someone goes outside, with some compelling reason to remain outdoors for some time, and it's mucky weather, so they get cold and wet. It's not very pleasant, but these things happen. Then they finish whatever they were doing, come back inside again, get warm and dry, and are perfectly all right. That's the normal course of events. Quite simple, perfectly straightforward, nothing at all unexpected there. I've done it myself loads of times.

Except in old books this doesn't happen. What happens instead is they come back inside and catch a chill. What the fuck is a chill? Some malady that strikes several hours after an experience of being cold and wet, apparently. Except this doesn't fucking happen. We all know this because we've all got cold and wet and not been struck by a chill afterwards, or any other mysterious weird illness for that matter. We can probably identify the word as something our grans used to warn us would happen if we got cold and wet and we used to laugh at them because we knew perfectly well it never did. (They probably got the idea from reading all those old gran-age books.) And by the same token, we still don't know what a chill actually is because real people never have it.

Of course the reason old books do that is that it's a convenient way of having some character unexpectedly and suddenly put out of action for a few weeks, or indeed quite often permanently (either because they die of it or it sends them loopy). Like "consumption" is another handy way of taking some character out of the story, in cases where the plot requires the event not to be sudden or unexpected. Except that one makes sense, because "consumption" is tuberculosis and in the days before antibiotics and vaccines to treat it people did indeed die of it all the time. It's entirely legitimate to have as many of your characters die of tuberculosis as you want, including whole families getting wiped out by it one by one, because that sort of thing happened all the time in real life so it's no strain on the imagination when you have it happening in fiction as well.

But this chill thing, that knocks you right down - and often fatally - some hours after you've finished with getting cold and wet, what the fuck is the real life justification for having that happen all the fucking time? It's not actual hypothermia, which knocks you down while you still are getting cold and wet (or else right after before you've had time to warm up again); it's something that happens after a lapse of several hours so you've warmed up again long ago. And in any case they seem to know fine about hypothermia and generally describe it pretty accurately. Nor can it be just a snooty-arsed Victorian word for a "cold" because the symptoms don't match. Having a temperature and feeling exhausted/dizzy so you go to bed, those happen; snot, sneezes, coughs, dribbling noses and the like do not.

Of course "cold" is also a fucking stupid name for that entirely real disease for much the same reasons: it's got fuck all to do with low temperatures. There's nothing cold about having a cold. And you don't fucking catch it from being cold either. You catch it from other people who already have colds and do not have the decency to keep their snot-spraying infectious bodies in isolation until it wears off, but instead insist on coming into work anyway to sit blearily around doing nothing effective apart from aerosolising their viruses for every other cunt to inhale and come down with the same fucking thing. You catch it from contact with the live virus, not from the fucking weather. If anything cold weather helps you not catch it, because the virus doesn't survive that long outside the human body in any case and coldness helps kill it off all the faster. You just have to avoid the temptation to escape the cold weather by spending more time shut in a box with germy fuckers.

Possibly the most pointless thing I have ever constructed...

MORE STUPID BOLLOCKS from the "Leave EU" cunts... This stupid headline: "£150 million is now being dished out from the healthcare budget in foreign aid."

That figure refers to the 2016/2017 contribution from the Department of Health to the ODA (Official Development Assistance) international development fund. The budget for the NHS for 2016/2017 is 120 Billion pounds. So that 150 million amounts to less than half a day's worth, and is even more trivial than the 350 million they plastered over their stupid bus and then admitted was a lie the morning after the referendum.

It does NOT mean that an extra 150 million is taken from the Department of Health budget. The way it works is that money spent to certain ends under certain conditions (see here) becomes eligible to be counted as ODA expenditure. This means things like the UK's subscription to the World Health organisation (which is fuck all to do with the EU), and expenditure on health care for asylum seekers who have arrived in the UK (asylum seekers are also fuck all to do with the EU).

The ODA contribution in total from all UK sources is 12 billion pounds. This is to meet a UNITED NATIONS commitment to provide 0.7% of GDP as ODA. Again, it's fuck all to do with the EU.

The UK does have something called an "EU attribution" for ODA, amounting to 935 million pounds in 2015 (see here). Again this does NOT mean we spend an extra 935 million on anything. All it means is that 935 million of what we would be spending anyway is allowed to be counted as part of the EU's ODA contribution. We would not be spending any less if we weren't in the EU; we'd still be spending the same, it just wouldn't be allowed to count as part of EU ODA any more.

So what do we end up with in reality? (1) That headline is so misleading and bears such a tenuous relationship to reality that the most concise description of it is "a load of arse". (2) The UK being in the EU makes not one fucking jot of difference to whether we would be spending that money or not, and for the "Leave EU" cunts to cite it as a reason for leaving is fucking bullshit on the standard pattern of lies and deception that the "Leave EU" movement relies on completely.

EVERY SINGLE FUCKING CLAIM made by the "Leave EU" cunts that I have ever investigated is like this. Deliberate misrepresentation, bullshit, and outright fucking lies. EVERY FUCKING ONE. And I am fucking pissed off about my country being wrecked by this bunch of lying shitheaded bastards constantly spouting complete fucking bollocks and deceiving everyone who is too thick to check it or too gullible to think it worth the bother. Has anyone worked out how viable it would be to have the fuckers up for treason? Because as far as I can see that's the best description of fuckers who wreck their own country for some personal gain.

Look, shut up about fucking CO₂. CO₂ is irrelevant. The whole fucking argument about whether human activity is causing climate change is irrelevant. There are two very good reasons for getting off fossil fuels which are no cause for argument, since they are not based on bent politicised science, but on being bleeding obvious; and they have been bleeding obvious for a very long time, and still applied just as strongly when the climate thing everyone was worried about was the next ice age coming on.

One is: finite supply. The stuff won't last for ever. It won't even come remotely close to lasting as long as we currently want it to. People try and deny this but they are talking shit. Everyone knows that when you've eaten all the sweets there aren't any more. They are also talking hypocritical shit, because they're already getting into scraping the goo out of the bong territory (this is what "unconventional sources", as applied to things like oil shale (which is basically shit coal), is a euphemism for). What they're really on about is that if everyone keeps wanting oil while it becomes harder and harder to get, they stand to make shitloads of money out of it. So they can get fucked.

Humans certainly do have a terrible track record for doing bugger all about obviously impending disasters until the shit has already hit the fan and everyone is fucked. Which is all the more reason for trying to avoid the bleeding obvious disaster of running out of oil without having a system in place to take over from it. Much more sensible to develop replacement energy sources as soon as possible before you're forced to, than hang on to oil like grim death and fight wars over the final drops of it (which is what we're set to do at the moment).

Which brings us to the other reason: to stop fucking up the politics of the Middle East and all the other shit politics that result from people who want oil trying to make sure other people can't stop them getting as much as they want. Again, the desirability of this is bleeding obvious. You have to be a blind clodpoll shit-for-brains to fail to see that. Or else an arms dealer or something who's creaming off it, and they can get fucked too.

Ever wondered what Donald Trump would look like if he was a barbecued chicken with a beer can up his arse?

Back to Pigeon's Nest


Be kind to pigeons

Older
random
shit -->