Wouldn’t you just love to have the guts to put one of these on your car?
Category - Funny
See if you can get your head around this one. And you’re not even drunk.
Well, I assume you’re not.
They’ve unveiled this sculpture of Florence Paton, Nottingham’s first female MP, in Carlton.
I wonder if it’s a good likeness? It looks like a character from Dr Who or Futurama.
I’ve been noticing this for some time now. Previously reputable news agencies reporting on things solely sourced from Facebook or Twitter.
It might not be what you’d call “reputable” in the usual sense of the word, but it is nevertheless a newspaper and so you’d expect some journalistic skill on display, but the Daily Mirror has reported on a “bizarre” TV interview between Joanna Lumley and The Black Eyed Peas. I saw it as an MSN newsfeed and wondered what might have happened for it to be labelled as such.
Well, the short answer is: absolutely nothing.
Basically, the “bizarreness” is simply that… well, Joanna Lumley interviewed The Black Eyed Peas. That’s it. That’s the entire story. The whole thing can be summed up perfectly in those five words. Joanna Lumley interviewed The Black Eyed Peas.
The Mirror, though, manages to string it out to 200 words and three screenshots from the interview. Two shots show people sitting on a couch, and one is a mistimed capture of the back of two people’s heads. The extra words come from The Mirror’s copy-and-paste-from-Twitter department, where they duplicate five complete Tweets from certified idiots, each saying that the interview was “bizarre”. As far as I can tell, the only reason it is “bizarre” even to these morons is because… well, Joanna Lumley interviewed The Black Eyed Peas.
The BBC does this sort of thing now, too. It isn’t averse to creating entire articles based on Twitter or Facebook posts, and it doesn’t even correct the appalling grammar that is endemic to those things. It even includes them totally un-spellchecked in most “sensible” articles. It must save them a lot of time.
I wouldn’t click on a link to any story about The Black Eyed Peas purely based on their music. It simply isn’t my scene. But the word “bizarre” is clickbait, and clickbaiting is the latest journalistic tool of choice to get people to pages full of adverts. MSN’s newsfeeds do it all the time – take my advice, and never click on any link which says “you’ll never guess what happened next” or has the word “adorable” or “sponsored” in it. Because whatever did happen next will be as interesting as staring at a wall, and I think that “adorable” is the Facebook generation’s preferred way of referring to any juvenile animal with less than six legs doing what juvenile animals with less than six legs naturally do (which frequently equates to doing absolutely nothing). “Sponsored” is a combination of those two things higher up the page designed to get you to the ads quicker.
We’re doomed. DOOMED.
I saw it on the TV earlier today. It’s another JML one (remember PediPaws and the Turbo Brush?) This time, it’s for Hollywood Pants – a lower-body garment that appears to be capable of the equivalent of turning a hippopotamus into a cheetah without the need for liposuction.
Take a look at the TV ad above. Now, I am a scientist by training, and I am aware of the Law of Conservation of Mass. Essentially, this says that matter can be neither created nor destroyed, but it can be rearranged. So my question is this.
When those women put those pants on, where does the fat actually go? Because it’s not inside the pants, that’s for sure.
You know how I’m always going on about the prats I have share this planet with? How about this one?
He goes into a garage and tries to put £10 of fuel in his car. He overshoots by 3p, but he doesn’t want to break into another note, and the garage won’t let him off the 3p (he’s actually got the money, remember). So what does he do? He phones the Police on 999.
Better still is the fact that he’s now gone on to Reddit to ask how he can get the Police to remove the video because it’s gone sort of semi-viral. As you can imagine, he doesn’t have much support (incidentally, to some of the smart arses on Reddit, that doesn’t sound like a Nottingham accent – more like a Derby one).
I had a pupil pass his test a few weeks ago, and when he handed his licence to the examiner at the end, she looked at his photo and said “bloody hell!”
He looked nothing like it.
It turned out that when he’d applied for his provisional licence, he’d accidentally ticked “use my passport photo” – which was fine, except that he’d had his passport for six years. So his licence photo had him when he was eleven years old!
I’d picked up on the visual difference when he first started lessons with me, but he hadn’t told me the full story. I hadn’t pursued it because I’m used to people of that age looking nothing like their licence photos (even down to hair colour being different between black and blonde, or with and without tattoos and face jewellery in some cases). I usually ask them how long they were in custody for when they had it taken – pointing out that my photos are the same, and that those photo booths must have a switch inside that can be set to “NORMAL-CRIMINAL”.
I made sure he took the licence and applied for his full entitlement himself, instead of the examiner doing it. I also explained how he had to keep the photo up to date in future – renewing it every 10 years… or if he had another full-face transplant in the meantime.
I updated this again. I’m still getting hits on the same search terms, such as:
- 13/10/2015 – “bribe driving examiner uk”
- 14/03/2016 – “how to tell if your driving examner is corputed [sic]”
- 26/03/2017 – “driving test how does bribe work woth instructors [sic]”
- 26/03/2017 – “bribing driving examiner”
- 28/03/2017 – “how much to bribe a driving examiner”
- 12/12/2017 – “have someone else do my driving test”
- 15/01/2019 – “can i bribe my driving examiner”
I wrote this article back in 2011, but I’m still getting people finding the blog on the search term “how do I bribe driving examiner” or something equally lacking in good English and grammar.
Look. If you are so stupid that you don’t know how to do this, ask yourself if you really should be driving a car unsupervised. Because you really shouldn’t. But since you obviously are that stupid, it means handing over money in return for a favour – in this case, a test pass even if you are a crap driver.
The simple fact that you’ve typed the question into a search engine means it can be traced back to you, and for all you know the agencies could be looking for people just like you. So well done for flagging yourself up to them as a cheat and a liar (and hope they go easy on you because you’re an idiot).
It’s hard to fathom how weak-minded someone needs to be to consider a criminal act such as this as a viable way to get what they want.
Bribery of driving examiners has less than a 0.1% chance of succeeding. However, the risk of jail (or deportation if you’re not from the UK) if you try it is so high, it is pretty much guaranteed. It’s far easier – and cheaper – to learn to drive properly and to take and pass your driving test legitimately. Just look at some of the idiots who have been prosecuted – two morons in this story, lots of them in this one, two more here.
One thing that’s becoming apparent is that the people most likely to consider paying someone else to do their test for them are usually from countries where fraud and corruption is a part of the political constitution. It’s also apparent that those most likely to take money from these idiots and then to try to impersonate them (even though they look nothing like them) come from those same communities!
Let’s try this in big red letters to see if it helps some of the stupid ones out there understand it better:
IT IS EASIER AND CHEAPER TO PASS YOUR TEST LEGITIMATELY THAN IT IS TO TRY AND BRIBE THE EXAMINER OR TO PAY SOMEONE TO IMPERSONATE YOU.
IN YOUR OWN COUNTRY – WHETHER IT IS IN THE EAST OR THE WEST – YOU MAY WELL FIND THAT EVERY ASPECT OF GOVERNMENT IS CORRUPT, AND EVERYTHING CAN BE OBTAINED IF YOU PAY THE RIGHT MONEY TO THE RIGHT PEOPLE. IN THE UK IT IS THE EXACT OPPOSITE. THEREFORE YOU ARE TAKING A HUGE RISK.
YOU ARE PROBABLY DESPERATE TO DRIVE SO THAT YOU CAN GET A JOB. IF YOU GET CAUGHT TRYING TO CHEAT YOU’LL BE LUCKY IF YOU EVER WORK AGAIN IN THE UK.
EVEN IF YOU FOUND A CORRUPT EXAMINER (HIGHLY UNLIKELY IN THE UK), AND ASSUMING THAT YOU GOT AWAY WITH IT (EVEN LESS LIKELY), THERE IS A GOOD CHANCE YOU WILL END UP KILLING SOMEONE BECAUSE YOU STILL CAN’T DRIVE.
How can I tell if my examiner is corrupt?
Or, as it was asked to find the blog, “how to tell if your driving examner [sic] is corputed [sic]”.
Ask him. If you end up in handcuffs in the back of a police van, then he obviously wasn’t. Or you didn’t offer him enough.
It’s cheaper to learn to drive properly, you idiot.
Can I get done trying to bribe an examiner?
Or more accurately, “can I get done tryong [sic] to bribe a [sic] examiner”?
See above.
Does bribing the driving examiner work?
Or, as was asked to find the blog, “does bribimg [sic] driving examiner work”?
See above.
Is it easier if I get someone to take the test for me?
If you get away with it, and if the person you choose is any good at driving, yes – but only in the sense that you won’t have to bother learning to drive properly. However, it will mean that you are still a crap driver and you may well end up killing someone. Paying someone to take the test for you is more expensive than learning properly. Your chances of successfully gaining a licence this way in the UK are almost zero, and even if you did initially get away with it, at some point they will catch the person you paid, trace all those he worked for, discover you were one of them, and take your false licence away. You will then be fined, perhaps imprisoned, or even deported if you are not a UK citizen.
If you’re still so stupid you want to try it, go ahead. And watch me laugh when you get caught.
Some idiot found the blog today on the search term “have someone else do my driving test”. Sorry, mate, but unless you get real you’ll be a loser until the day you die.
How could they catch me?
Look. This is the UK, and they take fraud very seriously. There is a special Fraud & Integrity department at DVSA which specifically looks for and investigates cases of bribery.
In any situation involving deception, you have the best chance of getting away with it if you are the only one involved, and the only one who is aware of it. By paying someone to take your test for you, or by trying to bribe an examiner, you are automatically increasing the number of people who know. You can control what’s inside your own head, but you can’t control others, and those other people – the test sitter or the examiner – are going to be involved with many like you also using their dishonest services. You can’t control any of those other people, and all it takes is for one of them to get caught, and the entire fraudulent network is immediately identifiable. Something as simple as someone being pulled over by the police for driving erratically could be enough to spark an investigation. The Fraud & Integrity group could even set up sting operations. Anyone an examiner has tested is known by name, and can be traced through their licence.
You would always be living in hope you don’t get found out. But eventually, you would be.
Wikipedia tells us that The Keystone Kops were…
…fictional, humorously incompetent policemen, featured in several silent film slapstick comedies produced by Mack Sennett for his Keystone Film Company between 1912 and 1917.
A local news item tells how a lunatic waving a machete around was reported to the Police on 4 May. The man who reported him is quoted:
He was screaming and coming down the road with the machete shouting ‘I’m going to chop you up’.
“If I hadn’t moved he would have caught me with it.”
The Police came and confiscated the weapon – but they didn’t arrest the man because:
…the force said they “couldn’t find any sign of a disturbance”.
They didn’t take a statement from the witness immediately, and the lunatic with the machete (who is clearly a mental case) was finally arrested a week later, on 11 May. The BBC video of what “no disturbance” looks like to Nottingham Police is therefore quite revealing. As is the apparent change in the Law, which it now seems allows you to have a machete in public in the first place and not be arrested.
Then there was this story from Worcester. Police there have put up a sign at the station telling criminals when the best (and most convenient) time to hand themselves in is.
It has since been removed, and officials are hopefully in the process of making sure those responsible are on their way back to stacking shelves at Tesco again.
And all this reminds me of a situation about four years ago. I stopped in a field gateway on a country lane near Bunny and observed three or four large bales of what I suddenly realised were Cannabis plants. I phoned the Police, and was told it wasn’t their problem and that I should contact the Council to have them removed. I did that, and after listening through a message that went roughly like this:
So that we can help you best, please choose from one of the following options. For roof repairs press 1, for door painting press 2… [a lot more removed so I don’t bore you to death]… for water discolouration press 27…
I pressed something I’d heard earlier and which sounded closest to what might be needed. The person who answered was like computer AI, but without the “I”, so I just said “oh, f**k it” and hung up.
The bales gradually rotted over the next few months.
Oh, yes. And then a couple of years ago. I was driving along Coventry Lane near Bramcote with a pupil, and a wanker in a pratmobile overtook us at high speed on the opposite side of those pedestrian central refuges – an absolutely illegal action – and almost had a head-on with another car. I reported it to the Police, pointing out I had him on dashcam, with his registration number clearly visible, and that I knew where he probably lived because of where he turned off a little further on. The Police weren’t interested, and basically told me that the dashcam footage wasn’t enough.
The legacy of The Keystone Kops lives on in Britain.
A grandmother was “shocked” when a horse turned up in her back garden. It had been “ordered on the internet” by her 13-year old granddaughter.
I don’t know why, but I just find it very, very funny – which is not helped by the fact the horse is apparently called “Mr Melvin Andrews”.