I love this one. Noveed Mumtaz was in court for attempting to dodge several speeding tickets. In one particular case, he said his mother was driving.
As you can see from the speed camera photo below, Mumtaz’s mother must have forgotten to shave that morning.
He was jailed for 6 months. Serves him right.
This story cracked me up this morning. Arsenal’s draw with Southampton on Tuesday was lessened in its severity by Chelsea’s draw last night with West Ham (a shame Manchester City won again, but you can’t have everything).
Jose Mourinho was obviously beside himself with anger, and is quoted:
This is not the best league in the world, this is football from the 19th Century… The only [other] thing I could bring was a Black and Decker [tool] to destroy the wall.
So, apart from walking right into Eric Cantona territory with that Black and Decker thing, he labelled West Ham as playing “football from the 19th century”. Apparently, when he collared Sam Allardyce about it in the tunnel after the game, Sam was laughing.
It’s a bit rich coming from someone who waited until he’d played Manchester Utd twice before selling one of his best players to them (and before Arsenal had played them twice), when he could easily have got rid of the surplus a week or two before. Those are tactics straight out of the High Seas era of the 1700s.
Big Sam was not in any way gloating over the incident when he said on camera:
He can’t take it, can he? He can’t take it because we’ve outwitted him – he just can’t cope… He can tell me all he wants, I don’t care…. I love to see Chelsea players moaning at the referee, trying to intimidate him, Jose jumping up and down saying we play rubbish football… It’s brilliant when you get a result against him. Hard luck, Jose.
Touché.
The headline of this one made me smile. More and more appliances are being built so they can connect to the internet, and although I’m as techy as they come, I have never been able to fathom why you’d want something like a toaster, a kettle… or a fridge to be able to connect to the web.
I mean, why on earth does a fridge need to have that feature? TVs have this dubious capability these days, and although in the case of these there is a half a good reason to be able to do it (downloading firmware updates, and maybe downloading content), the fact that the damned things can autonomously connect and start pumping data out without your knowledge is of far more benefit to others than it is to the owner. LG, for example, has been coming over all Google and has been caught harvesting data it really shouldn’t have. Apple has been doing it for ages. And I won’t even try and list the numerous separate occasions on which Google has been caught spying on people – sending you emails about things you’ve looked at is just the tip of the iceberg, and most people will remember the Google Maps cars harvesting private Wi-Fi signals.
But the idea of a fridge sending out spam is as funny as it is sinister.
Some time ago I wrote about the JML PediPaws nail trimmer for cats and dogs. At the time, it must have rated as the stupidest product ever – though plenty of Westie owners were clearly enthralled enough to buy it in spite of the obvious drawbacks, judging from the Amazon user reviews.
More recently, there was the JML PediPro. I didn’t write about this – I thought I had, but I can’t find it if I did. It’s like an electric razor for feet – human feet, this time – and the TV ad shows it grinding about a kilo of dead skin off some woman’s foot (I was having my dinner the first time they showed it). The reviews on Amazon reveal that it is a low-quality product that doesn’t appear to either do the job it says it does much of the time, or do it for very long before breaking.
And now, we have the JML Turbo Brush. You can call me old-fashioned, but to my mind a tool like this would – if it actually worked – come with a safety warning. Any footage of it working would see it producing sparks as it contacted a hard surface, and flinging bits of baked-on grease around the room. You see, the Laws of Physics absolutely dictate that it would do all these things if it was anywhere near powerful enough to do what it claims to be able to. And it wouldn’t run off four AA batteries. There’d be a generator out back.
As an aside, many years ago there was a TV advert for Spry Crisp’n’dry cooking oil. The ad showed chips (French fries to American readers) being cooked in the stuff and then – the point being that food was especially crispy when cooked in Spry – one was broken in half on camera. The chip in question was clearly the softest and least crispy of its kind, but that didn’t stop the sound effects crew dumping a hefty “snick” sound over the top. If you shut your eyes, it sounded like someone had snapped a pencil.
Well, the Turbo Brush must come courtesy of the same ad people. The blurb on JML’s website says:
Zap! Wham! Doktor Power Turbo Brush uses sonic power to make dirt and grime vanish in a flash. This heavy-duty scrubber generates over 12,000 oscillating scrubs per minute and is perfect for cleaning in awkward, hard to reach areas.
So, the four AA batteries make it vibrate. That seems pretty clear. But “scrubs”? That suggests to me that the brush head moves several centimetres either way – which it doesn’t. Mind you, the video seems to imply that the head oscillates – though most of the work appears to come from moving your hand around. And could those stains be any more phoney?
You’ve got to be realistic about this. You’re not going to be able to remove really caked-on dirt with something that runs off four small batteries any faster than you would be able to using a toothbrush and some elbow grease. And unless it was built specifically to withstand a nuclear strike, it isn’t going to last long if you use it a lot (indeed, some of the Amazon reviews make exactly that point).
We’re only a few days into the year and already there are numerous candidates for the 2014 Darwin Awards. These early candidates come courtesy of the bad weather we’ve been having recently.
The first ones come from Blackpool.
The next one is in Wales.
Not sure about these next two, but they’re from the same BBC news video clip.
But you really need to run that news clip – this guy is current front runner for the 2014 award. He is clearly shitting himself, because he nearly got washed out to sea.
People have already died because they got too close and were washed away. Police have issued warning after warning about staying away.
But still they come – those members of society having only one helix in their DNA, or an abnormal number of chromosomes. Oh, yeah. And they all appear to wear hoodies.
October 2014 update here.
This made me smile. You have to remember that the claims of sexism are from the West – China doesn’t see it that way.
Police in Beijing have put out a series of advisories for female drivers via China’s equivalent of Twitter.
Some women drivers lack a sense of direction and while driving a car they often hesitate and can’t decide which road to take… Once they realize their mistake, they cause accidents by spinning the steering wheel in a panic.
[women drivers] are not able to find the way to their destination, even if they’ve been there many times.
Women drivers tend to panic following an accident… They usually draw a complete mental blank, providing opportunities for criminals.
These are just three of the pieces of advice. As you might expect, China’s female population isn’t taking it lightly. One candidate for the Dippy Blond Awards has replied:
This is discrimination! Many male drivers are idiots, too.
Obviously, Chinese feminists are less skilled when challenging alleged sexism than their Western counterparts.
Apparently, this advice comes hot on the heels (no pun intended) where a recent accident occurred after a woman’s high heel got stuck. Mind you, China’s journalists (certainly, their cartoonists) are similarly naive.
About a month ago I mentioned the on-going ban on women drivers in Saudi Arabia, and some official over there had tried to argue that driving could harm a woman’s reproductive system and give rise to birth defects.
Well, it appears that the ban is not 100% supported by the Saudi male population, either. Comedian, Hisham Fageeh, has made a spoof video poking fun at the ridiculous claims and overall topic. It’s clever and funny, and to the tune of Bob Marley and the Wailers’ No Woman, No Cry.
This came in on the newsfeeds. Apparently, at normal speed (the video is speeded up), it took her over 4 minutes to get out of that parking bay. At least she didn’t hit anything, though she came darned close a couple of times.
Edit: As of 2023, I discovered the video no longer exists. So enjoy this one instead. Same thing, just someone else
A reader sent me an email which made me laugh out loud. Here it is in full:
Thought you may enjoy this – from the [coaching spam source] Facebook page. An ADI posts:
Just spent a 2 hour lesson with a lady who cannot tell the difference between the different pedestrian crossings plus the flashing amber light being a complete mystery to her. After driving thru quite a few and realising that the penny hadnt (sic) dropped. We pulled into the side and the rest of the lesson was role reversal where she had to explain to me about the differences. She ended up asking for pen and paper, and gave me diagrams so that I would understand the difference. She was delighted with the outcome and now knows all about the above.
Don’t know about you, but it’s stuff like that that tells me I wouldn’t be much cop at coaching!
I know that the author of the email IS good at coaching, of course. He’s a successful driving instructor. He means this type of coaching – the sickly kind that comes with a price tag attached.
You have to laugh. Someone found the blog on the following search term:
is stallibf a najor or mibor
For those who don’t speak gobbledegook, this should read: is stalling a major or a minor? Fortunately, language skills are not a barrier to getting your licence. Of course, whether they should be a barrier or not is open to debate.
I’ve written about stalling on your test before. Stalling isn’t automatically a serious fault – but it could be. And it could easily turn into one if you don’t deal with it correctly and panic.