The local BBC News site had a warning after some local troglodytes were seen waving bags at stags in Wollaton Park. Bear in mind that it is the rutting season, and the last thing any sane person needs is a pair of deer antlers up their backside.
But this bit is funny:
Kath George, museum assistant at Wollaton Hall, said…
“Our advice is always the same, no matter what the season, or whether the deer have children with them – DO NOT approach them!
“They are wild animals…”
I always thought a young deer was a fawn. But it seems that we’re now anthropomorphising them for some reason.
It started out as a dimwit prankish kind of thing, then the sicko-perverts got in on the act. In the UK, incidents seem confined to the Newcastle area at the moment, suggesting that over here it’s still just a low-IQ thing.
I had to laugh when I saw this progression in America, though. Utah police have had to issue warnings to residents that it isn’t OK to shoot clowns at random if you see one.
Mind you, as I’ve already mentioned, this IS America, and Utah police obviously have to keep hold of that baton. Someone asked:
Can I shoot or take action against someone that is dressed up like a clown?
Now, in most civilised territories, the answer to this would be a straightforward “no”. But not in Utah. There, they have to cloud the issue with this response:
That’s not a simple yes or no question. It has a lot of variables to it.
Erm. No, it doesn’t. It has one variable: x = “can I kill someone dressed as a clown?” And there’s a simple, single answer: “no!”
It’s been in the news over the last year or so, but “the world’s longest aircraft” has been having test flights in the UK. It’s basically a big balloon with propellers – not entirely unlike a Zeppelin.
I’m not really interested in the row surrounding David Cameron’s resignation honours list (other than the oxymoron that seems to be contained in that three-word description). But it seems like a lot of people are.
I particularly like the comment from someone called “lorraine”. Here’s the full text, complete with spelling mistakes and missing grammar:
Of Course May wont interveine she is a conservative They rob the poor to feed the rich nothing will change The richest will still live of the backs of the poor May wants to stop slavery of course NOT she just wants to rename it something more fitting the description of used tortured raped beeten intimidated that is what most low paid workers are treated like Who intruduced this The Conservative.
Once more, I am left dumbfounded by the fact that people like “lorraine” are allowed to vote and have families without having to get special permission first. And don’t even get me started on the nine people who voted her comment up.
Many of you will have heard the stories about dumb labels. It’s sometimes hard to work out which end of the chain is the dumbest – the designer or the user – but whatever the reason, it is deemed necessary to state the most obvious facts in the most patronising way possible on many things that you buy.
Actually, while I was looking for examples, I came across this website with some funny ones. I particularly like the veterinary tablets for someone’s dog, with the warning of drowsiness, and not to drink alcohol or operate heavy machinery after taking them. It’s obvious that they’re mostly American – we aren’t that bad. At least, I didn’t think so until today.
I’ve joked with my local Chinese takeaway before about how their menu warns that Chicken with Cashew Nuts “may contain traces of nuts”. And it is on the subject of nuts – peanuts in fact – that an alert appeared in my inbox today.
The Food Standards Agency announced that Lidl is recalling its Alesto brand of Honey Peanuts because peanuts are not mentioned in English on the packaging. I didn’t realise things had gotten so bad. I mean, Lidl is a German company and much of what it sells comes from non-UK sources. I thought everyone was aware of that. But going a step further, what on earth would someone with a life-threatening food allergy be doing buying something to eat without knowing what was in it? Come on. We’re talking about peanuts here – or “erdnüsse” – the number one killer of humans in the UK, if you believe the media on these things.
And as if this wasn’t bad enough, another warning came through advising that Lidl is recalling its Milbona brand of Fruit Yoghurt due to – wait for it – the presence of undeclared milk! Where the hell do people think yoghurt comes from? Bees?
Food manufacturers are living a nightmare if the number of FSA alerts I see is anything to go by. Not a day passes without recalls due to undeclared milk, eggs, soya, sesame, mustard, wheat, gluten, and so on. Asda even had to do a recall a couple of weeks ago to milk “as an allergen” being incorrectly worded – I’d have though that someone who was likely to explode if they consumed milk would be aware that the word they were looking for on the label was “milk”. But it seems that manufacturers have to provide an encyclopaedic description these days, or face an expensive recall.
Still, I suppose this Lidl thing is all leading nicely toward Brexit and the New British Nationalism (if it ever happens, and let’s hope it doesn’t).
I’m in favour of gadgets – I always have been. But only ones that make any sense.
Getting a mobile phone made sense when they first reached a sensible size back in the early 90s. And getting a digital camera made sense when they first reached a sensible price point (also 90s). Getting a computer made sense – firstly, one of the original home computers (late 70s/ early 80s), then a PC (late 80s) once it started to assert itself. Even getting an electronic doorbell kit made sense in 1977 – OK, I’m stretching that one a bit (the original non-electronic ones had a solenoid in them with a central core which acted as a hammer. When you pressed the door button the core would be displaced to strike a metal plate to give a “ding”, and a spring would send it back to hit another plate to give the “dong” when you released the button).
There’s a lot of technology that doesn’t make sense, though, and which only appeals to children and Doctor Who fans. It includes things like Google Glass, Google Self-driving cars, and smart watches. I’ll stick my neck out and say that these will never catch on – no matter how much Google spams the media with stories about how they will.
But now we have another one – I think Amazon is trying to snatch some of the limelight back from Google when it comes to stretching the limits of reason. This article – somewhat unsurprisingly on a games website, though it is covered in other news sources – reports that Amazon is planning to use drone octocopters to deliver packages to customers.
Now, while I am sure that the Doctor Who fans out there will think it’s a brilliant idea – and it is, if you come from the planet Vulcan or are captain of the Battlestar Galactica – there are numerous real world issues to deal with down here on Earth. You can start by watching the promo video below:
Amazon reckons the drone can deliver packages weighing up to around 2¼ kg. I love the way that they clarify this for those whose DNA only contains a single helix:
[it] won’t work for larger and bulkier products, of course, like kayaks and tablesaws.
And TVs. And computers. And a lot of other things that people are likely to want.
Let’s go a little deeper into the reality of the matter. You can already get hobby quadcopters like the Parrot AR Drone. If you look seriously into buying one (all right, I admit it. I have been thinking of getting one purely for the fun value) one of the first things you would investigate after seeing and recovering from the price is flight time and range – how long do you get in the air from a single battery charge, and how far away can it fly before you lose control? Very quickly, your plans to enter the world of James Bond falter when you discover that flight time is up to 15 minutes – or half an hour if you buy the super-duper power pack – combined with a virtual tether of about 50 metres in open space. If you’re anything like me, you then start imagining what’s going to happen if the power runs out or control is lost while your drone is still airborne – and you then check out the wide availability of spare parts plus YouTube videos of how to replace the propellers, the main cross member, the main circuit board, and so on (i.e. it crashes and gets broken a lot). Of course, this assumes that you can retrieve it from the tree it’s lodged in, the roof it’s on, or the middle of the road it’s smashed into before someone runs over it. Or that you can even find it (you’ll undoubtedly have fitted it with a location beacon).
Now, I can’t see how Amazon has managed to get much beyond these technical limitations when you look at the size of its octocopter. It might be a bit bigger, but that means it needs more power because it is heavier (and it has eight motors to power plus a bigger payload). And when you consider that Amazon’s nearest fulfilment centre to me is in Doncaster, any droid would have to fly about 45 miles. Even at an average speed of 10mph that means it would have to be airborne for around 9 hours (assuming it had to get back to base after it dropped the package). The solution to the distance – autonomous navigation via GPS – just means a greater initial weight, and is firmly in Google’s driverless car territory.
That brings us to the small matter of trees, overhead telephone and power cables, lamp posts, wind, rain, snow. I don’t think GPS allows for all those – people in the USA might be able to land a helicopter in their back yard, but many UK streets have a blanket of wires radiating out from telephone poles, and going to individual houses. Many UK gardens have no clear landing zone due to small size, overhanging trees, washing lines, rusting cars and other crap, and so on.
Initially, the service is targeted at American audiences, and although I don’t want to stereotype anyone or anything, in a place where gun ownership is almost mandatory, small commercial drones automatically fall into the same group as rats and pigeons. Some nutter with a gun and a paranoid delusion about Amazon and it’s “spy planes” is bound to take one down sooner rather than later.
So although it is a good idea on paper, I think the technology and the practicalities will stop it happening for the foreseeable future. A bit like computers that can think – they’ve been on about that since the 60s, with every successive generation claiming it will be “soon”. Yet we’re no nearer having one.
Note that such deliveries in the UK are going to have to involve a very select group of people and properties.
I saw a story in yesterday about how the police had stopped a car in Birmingham in which sheep had been spotted. The police subsequently issued this photo:
The blurring of the lambs’ faces was done by one of the officers as a joke “due to their age and vulnerability.” It made me laugh when I saw it (especially because the lamb on the left is standing there like Shaun the Sheep).
I’ve noticed that the newspapers are increasingly relying on “selfie” photos when they’re reporting on various stories. It must save them a fortune being able to harvest pictures from social media pages operated by the people they’re writing about instead of having to send a reporter out and take an actual photograph.
What bugs me about selfies is that they always involve an identical pose by the immature and socially inept female being written about. It occurred to me that there might be a market for a selfie kit, consisting of some oversized plastic lips and a pair of clip-on doe eyes. The image above is a collection of the first photos which come up when you Google the word “selfies” (just out of interest, you have to scroll quite a way down to find any male selfies).
I don’t use Facebook much (or Twitter – and I don’t use any of the other social networking sites at all), but the fact that I have an account means that I get almost daily spam alerting to me to people “who I might know”. It’s quite spooky that a lot of the time I actually DO know them. And all of the females have their albums plastered with these bloody pictures – every single one of them conforming to the same contrived pose. And none of the ones I know look anything like they do in their selfies.
It was while I was looking for pictures of fake plastic lips pictures and clip-on doe eyes that I discovered someone got in there before me, albeit in a different way – and this might easily explain why so many of these pictures look the same. It turns out you can buy suction devices which are designed to make bigger pouts! One listing on eBay contains no fewer than 20 photos showing such a device, how to use it, and the results you apparently get – including a load of selfies.
It says that you might suffer bruising, which isn’t surprising. Basically, it’s the equivalent of a love bite (or hickey). And you look a complete prat while you’re using it.
It suddenly reminded me of something that happened when I was about six. You used to be able to buy a cough sweet called Zubes which, if my memory is correct, were strange grey-coloured lozenges with black centres (like a sugar pill which had then been sugar coated). I have mixed memories of them tasting bloody horrible, since they contained Aniseed (which I hate), but with an animated TV advert featuring a horse, I think, and the strap line “go suck a Zube”. It seems you can still get them, but they come in a bag now. But back in those days they came in a sturdy round metal tin. One day, and in typical six-year old fashion, I was playing with an empty tin and I remember putting it over my mouth and sucking so that it stuck to my face. Also in typical six-year old fashion, I kept it there for some time. When I eventually released the vacuum I almost shit myself when I saw that my lips were about four times bigger than before. They stayed like that for an hour or two, though I was firmly convinced I was going to look like Mick Jagger forever.
Back then, a selfie – if anyone had been inclined to waste the limited number of potential shots on their roll of film – would have required a trip to the chemists with a Kodak cartridge, and the certain knowledge that 80% of your pictures wouldn’t “come out” when you went to pick them up a week later, because the Instamatic you’d used could only focus on objects between 2 metres and ∞, and those that did would show pretty much everything except your face (blurred thumbs, trees, next door’s cat, and so on).
It’s also worth noting that the standard selfie is taken from a slightly elevated perspective in order to also take in an exaggerated cleavage. There are plenty of well-documented ways of enhancing that part of the body already, so we only need to focus on the lips and eyes part. I am convinced that many selfie poses have been Photoshopped to make the person’s eyes look bigger. It’s so easy to do.
And it’s even easier when you consider that there are dozens of apps out there which are specifically designed to enlarge the eyes in selfie images! Better still, there are apps to enlarge the lips, too. That was something else I discovered while I was writing this.
In a nutshell, it seems that the reason all those selfies look the same is that the idiots posting them actually HAVE taken steps to enlarge their lips and their eyes.
