A kangaroo took exception to being filmed by a drone copter and took matters into its own… paws.
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Category - Funny
This one is so sad that it’s funny! The Broadway Hotel in Blackpool apparently charged a couple £100 via their credit card because they posted a negative review of their stay there on Trip Advisor. The hotel even had it written as a clause in their small print that they would make such a charge if anyone said bad things about them.
If you look them up on Trip Advisor, Broadway Hotel has a 2-star rating, placing them in 858th position out of 894 hotels in the area. Out of 256 reviews, over 200 customers rated them as “average” or worse (147 rated them “terrible”). Assuming they charged all of the “terrible” voters £100, the hotel will have netted a cool £15k – or over £25k if they didn’t like being rated as anything other than “fantastic”.
As it turns out, Broadway Hotel has now scrapped the “fine” clause after Trading Standards went sniffing around. There is no mention of any refunds, though. The wording in the article clearly states that they will stop doing it “in the future”. However, by implication this means they shouldn’t have been doing it in the first place, which implies in turn that any “fines” already levied were invalid.
The reason it’s so funny is that you really couldn’t have ended up with a worse review as a result of trying to engineer a good one. Even better is the fact that my neighbour’s cat could have sussed that such a ploy was wrong on just about every front imaginable, and that it was only a matter of time before it backfired on whoever thought of it. And you can’t help wonder why Broadway Hotel didn’t put as much energy into just fixing the problems as it did trying to hide them through what would be tantamount to extortion if you wrote it into a film script.
extortion
Law. the crime of obtaining money or some other thing of value by the abuse of one’s office or authority.
The obtaining of property from another induced by wrongful use of actual or threatened force, violence, or fear, or under colo[u]r of official right.
It remains to be seen if this is the end of the matter now that it is clear Broadway Hotel was overstepping its mark.
I wrote about candidates for the 2014 Darwin Awards back in January, following several deaths, near-deaths, and plain stupid behaviour during the bad weather. As of October, I think Peter Shaw – drug dealer – has virtually clinched the trophy with nearly three months of the year left.
Shaw, who comes from Nottingham (it doesn’t say what part, but it would be a very short shortlist of likely estates), was photographed by a friend handling and preparing large quantities of drugs. The story also doesn’t say how the police got hold of these photos, but they did find Shaw in possession. He was jailed for three years.
Det Con Steve Fenyn said Shaw’s conviction was helped by his ego after he was “caught in the act on camera”.
You’ve got to be from the lowest depths of the bottom sewer of society to have any sort of “ego” on something like this. I think it might have had a lot more to do with Shaw’s abnormal number of chromosomes, which would have been passed on to him by whoever and whatever his parents were. I mean, he can’t even be a criminal properly!
It’s a great story, though.
Imagine that you have an online retailer who sells, let’s say, groceries. They fulfil all orders from their own warehouse. You place an online order which includes a bag of flour. When your shipment arrives, you find that instead of flour, you have been supplied with 2kg of Cocaine. When you protest, the supplier apologises, insisting that it was a computer error and you were supplied with the wrong item.
Now, I don’t know about you, but there is no possible scenario I can imagine which explains the error away properly. Yes, there may well have been a computer glitch. But how do you explain the Cocaine in the first place?
On a related note, I saw this story on the BBC website. Apparently, the London School of Economics (LSE) sent out a welcome email to its students – 25% of whom are East Asian – and some “test names” from the database resulted in people being identified as Kung Fu Panda.
The university says that other test names used include Piglet, Paddington, Homer, Bob and Tinkerbell.
Yes, but there’s no mention of people being identified by those names. More telling is this bit:
The use of this ‘name’ merely reflects that a member of staff who set up the test record is a fan of the film.
It’s an odd name to choose. Joe Bloggs or John Smith are the ones I usually go for. I’d steer well clear of double-barrelled monikers if I were testing a database. They also say:
The email was sent to all students and did not target students from any particular background.
The article doesn’t mention any non-Asian examples. What I do know is that Asian students usually turn up a week or two earlier than everyone else (I’ve mentioned this before). Maybe Finding Nemo is in that database somewhere, too?
I saw a handful of palaeontology stories on the BBC website this week that made me smile. The first one informed us that Archeopteryx “wore feather trousers for display”.
I love the way that they can confidently deduce the entire colour scheme on the right from the fossil on the left. And I’m also amazed that anyone could make a living out of mocking up these creatures (if you look closely in the link, the feathered one on the right is a collection of bits of modern birds glued on to a model).
The second story concerned the “largest flying bird” ever.
This time, we get an artist’s impression rather than an actual model – look closely at the beak region and marvel at what appears to be an Albatross with teeth added.
The third story – and this link is not on the BBC, though that’s where I first saw it – provides a video showing how a 440 million year old spider would have walked.
The amusing thing about this is that the video gives the impression of a creature the size of a small dog, when in actual fact the spider in question was only a few millimetres long. I can’t imagine an arachnid that small moving in a similar manner to an elephant!
Anyway, I’ve come to the conclusion that the steps involved in creating a mock-up of anything that’s extinct are as follows:
- select a modern animal to compare against
- change the environmental context as necessary
- pick the most bizarre colour palette you can find in Photoshop
- add some teeth
You will note how I have demonstrated this using a cuddly Toucan. In its normal setting, it looks just like a Toucan should.
However, by applying the above steps, you can see how a prehistoric version – toucanosaurus – would have looked if it had walked into New York (it couldn’t have flown, as it would obviously have been flightless back then). This is a definite likeness of such a prehistoric Toucan if one ever existed, by the way.
I mean, who can prove otherwise?
I’ve always been a fan of the Dilbert comic strip. I think it’s because Scott Adams bases every strip on his own experiences in the rat race, and supplements it with examples submitted by readers who are still suffering. In other words, it’s pretty much true to life.
I updated my book collection recently with some new Dilberts. As a result, I had a few nasty nightmares at the reminder of what I had to put up with. This one deserves some comment:
I have forgotten now the number of times that the idiot managers at the idiot company I worked for behaved exactly like this. Most of them had read about computers somewhere, but that was about as far as their knowledge went. In the latter days I was trying to get them to accept electronic signatures, but this was opposed by the Quality Control department (who effectively bottlenecked everything we did) in favour of antiquated pen and paper.
Most of the senior QC people couldn’t use email properly, and they therefore refused to answer any question via that method. Their messages – if you ever got one – were restricted to short one liners, or entire cut-and-pasted documents from their secretaries. The other problem was that these people lived for meetings and you could rarely catch any of them in their offices. Getting quick answers was impossible, and scheduling a meeting with them was equally frustrating since you were after an answer today – often, for a job that was sitting half-finished in the factory – but couldn’t get on their calendars for a week or more. All the QC people authorised to sign off paperwork only ever attended meetings – they had no other obvious function, and it was often years since they had held a test tube or carried out any sort of chemical analysis. Then, when you finally did get hold of someone (and I have one particular guy in mind here), instead of an answer he would give you “something to think about”, which was bloody useless.
In fact, this guy was virtually (but not quite) the only approved QC signatory for all of the production paperwork we had to write, primarily as a result of the general ignorance of the rest of them outside their rigid empires. You’d write a production process document for a new job, run it past everyone and his dog, get them all to sign it (a total of at least six signatures were required, sometimes including several from the customer), then submit it to this guy in QC. It would inevitably come back with a load of major “think about this” comments scribbled all over it. He did this even on documents which were merely copies of ones he’d approved previously (i.e. when we were doing a repeat job). Customers were doing their nuts over it, never mind about me.
These QC people were the same ones who had argued that all pocket calculators had to be properly validated – every single one of the thousands that were in use, and the tens of thousands that would have been used in the next few years. It would have required validation protocols in huge numbers. It never happened – and there was no way it ever would have. But it provided the opportunity for hundreds of meetings on the subject.
It was these technophobes in QC who called the shots over electronic signatures. The most technophobic were also the most senior, and arguing with them was heresy in itself. Let’s just say that I was definitely a heretic. The irony is that you can be certain that they are now accepting electronic signatures. The company that took them over will almost certainly have insisted on it.
I’ve reached the conclusion that in order to own any Apple device you have to be an annoying and pretentious bastard at the genetic level. I just saw this latest advert for the iPad Air (click the Esa-Pekka link) and it is already driving me mad. It also seems to help if you’re immature and enjoy making a noise just for the sake of it – as the recent iPhone advert shows.
In my experience, the vast majority of iPhone owners have scratched or cracked screens, and the early stages of carpal tunnel syndrome as a result of such erudite exchanges as:
I knw u wld rather spk 2 evr1 lk thiz n stead of rglr tlk cuz it mch ezr 2 type it all up
dnt b lk tht m8. :l
roflmao 😉
I’d say that about 99.998% of all Apple users aren’t composers or musicians (if you exclude rap and hip-hop from the term “music”, which you would if you had any sense). Clearly, 99.998% are as thick as two short planks!
This story came through on the news feeds today. Apparently, the NSA is harvesting photos of people in order to build up its database to be used for face recognition. They are harvesting millions of photos every day according to the latest Edward Snowden leaks.
Coincidentally, I got some new Dilbert books over the weekend, and this strip really made me laugh.
Apparently, the NSA would need to get court approval to get pictures of Americans – unless they email a photo outside the US.
I think what they mean is that the NSA would need court approval if it was going to admit to anything. Previous Snowden leaks suggest that they don’t concern themselves overmuch with petty things like that.
People will have picked up from some of my articles that I am a cat person. This brilliant story came through on the newsfeeds about a cat which saved a boy from a dog attack in California, USA. (Edit: the original video has been removed from YouTube. This one is from the newspapers).
From what I can gather, the dog has been is to be put down (and so it should have been). But kudos to the cat, who clearly seems to be defending the child and not just its territory. Cats might square up to dogs if they’re threatened themselves, but they don’t usually get physical. For one to go in with such ferocity is very unusual, particularly since the threat was not directed towards the cat itself. The dog, which had clearly been after blood, was certainly fazed by the attack.
This has been all over the news today. The BBC has an interview with the family here, and the hero cat – who is called Tara – is a dead ringer for one we used to have.
Apparently, she was a rescue cat or stray the family adopted.
Watching the video of the attack again, you can clearly see the cat slam into the dog, look round at the boy, then chase the dog further away.
I’ve tagged this as “funny”, but that’s only in the sense that the dog got the tables turned on it. It’s a great story, though.
This keeps getting better. It would appear that Tara has been invited to pitch the first ball at the next home game of Bakersfield Blaze minor league baseball team.
Actually, having seen the video of the event, it wasn’t as funny as it could have been. Still a nice story overall, though.
As regular readers will know, I have little time for people who drive badly (especially on purpose) in spite of what some looney mystery cyclists may believe. So this story in The Telegraph gave me a good chuckle.
It seems that some half-witted 17-year old up in Scotland was following the standard script to the letter when he crashed his Honda pratmobile a week after passing his test. Make no bones about it, it WAS a pratmobile – as the picture before the accident shows. And Honda Civics are at the top of the must-have pratmobile list for most boy racers. His father, Steven Clark, was not impressed.
So he listed the car on Gumtree for 1 penny, including the following text:
Due to Son thinking he’s Colin McRae I now have a 2000 Honda Civic 1.4 breaking for spares…
It Seems a 1.4 was to much for him to handle
He talked the talk, but certainly didn’t walk the walk (he will be walking now, for a long time)
If only all roads were straight, we as parents wouldn’t have to worry about our over enthusiastic Son’s
It seems his ambition outweighed his talent on this occasion
I can’t think why! he’s been driving for over a week now……………………………..
Included in anything you may buy!
One FOC 17yr old Boy, complete with black eye? not from accident, administered by myself!
None of the press coverage I have seen has included that last part. Let’s hope the dad doesn’t get into any trouble over it if it’s true, because it’s certainly deserved.
Nathaniel Clark wasn’t hurt in the accident. He lost it on a bend (big surprise) because the difference between his own opinion of his driving skills and the reality was huge, but reckons he was driving slowly. It also turns out he rides a dirt bike, so it doesn’t take much effort to assess his attitude from afar.
Apparently, he apologised to his mother, but not his dad – to whom his plaintive cry is:
Dad, why are you doing this to me?
Clearly, he’s not very bright, either, if he can’t work that one out.
On a slightly different note, the car cost £1,700 and a further £1,600 to insure. The parents paid for it all. And this is where it makes me wonder what parents are thinking when they buy pratmobiles for their kids in the first place.