I had to get up at 5.30am to pick up a pupil at 7am for an 8.20am test. I hate getting up early, but it is the best time to book tests so as not to disrupt the rest of my diary (although I finished at 10pm tonight, so it’s been a long day).
He passed first time with 7 driver faults, so well done AS.
Then I had a 12.30pm pickup for a 2.05pm test. This was an older pupil, and she was very nervous – she’d been sick this morning due to worry over the test. The thing was, she’s a great driver and the kind I’d put money on passing, but nothing I could say could persuade her that she stood a good chance of passing (it’s always the same, though).
And she did pass, with just 4 driver faults. Well done YC.
On top of all this I had the second lesson (8-10pm) with a new pupil who hadn’t driven before last Sunday, and he is going to be an absolute joy: he learns fast and he’s very pleasant. Plus he wants to pass as soon as possible and is taking 2 hour lessons several times a week.
This story in The Telegraph covers a battle looming amongst Marks & Spencer (a UK retailer) shareholders concerning M&S’s surcharge on bras of size DD and above.
In summary, there is a bunch of lunatics calling themselves Busts 4 Justice who cannot accept that the extra material required to make a larger bra warrants an extra charge. Basically, they’re a bunch of feminists… and all that that implies from the perspectives of intelligence and reason.
Ever since I can remember, if I want an XL (or XXL, or XXXL, depending on the system used – usually, a mere L wouldn’t fit a Barbie Doll) T-shirt then I am accustomed to pay more for it than if I bought an S (which probably would need a magnifying glass to see properly). The same goes for underwear, trousers, shirts, suits, and so on.
Why do these idiots have to assume that brassieres are any different?
Ah, yes! They are feminists – so although anything which is pro-male is evil incarnate, it is completely acceptable for things to be pro-female… and the more anti-male the pro-female propaganda is the more acceptable it will be to these morons.
Can you imagine what small people might start doing if they twig that they’re paying the same as women with big breasts and tiny brains?
I also heard on the radio at lunchtime that this organisation has bought shares in M&S, and it plans to disrupt the next shareholder meeting with its protests (heaven knows what form these will take).
Edit: Seems like a lot of people are actually interested in Busts 4 Justice’s website – it’s actually a Facebook page and you can find it here.
They’ve got 15,500 members, and I can’t help wondering how many of them are men. But I will point out to them all that although M&S appears to have scrapped the surcharge (i.e. it is now making a loss/less profit on the larger sizes at a time of recession – well done ladies), it has done so not because Busts 4 Justice is right but because it wants to avoid the bad publicity childish behaviour at a shareholder meeting would create.
I didn’t mention that The Sun’s online story yesterday ( which I commented on here) had the web page title ‘ All Humanity Is At Risk ‘. Alarmist or what?
Well, today they have another story about a new case and the web page this time is titled ‘ Swine Flu Victims Face Bed Lottery In Pandemic ‘. Erm. It isn’t a pandemic and no one is facing a lottery for beds. But other than that it is totally accurate.
The Sun trumpets:
BRITAIN’S first person-to-person transfer of swine flu has been confirmed today.
NHS worker Graeme Pacitti, 24 – a pal of swine flu couple Iain and Dawn Askham **“ is being treated for the killer bug, the Scottish government said.
If what I heard on the radio today is true – and if it is pitted against The Sun then I’ll lay odds on it being so – they can’t confirm it is swine flu and the doctor they interviewed said the guy had some sniffles and things. Hardly the exploding intestines, erupting volcanoes, and cessation of all life on the planet the likes of The Sun is telling us swine flu gives rise to.
EDIT: OK. It has been confirmed Mr Pacitti has caught it from the two people who brought it back from Mexico. However, on the radio they were interviewing him by telephone and he was just saying how he felt a bit unwell. As I remember it, normal flu lays you out like anything and giving phone interviews is way down your list of capabilities, let alone priorities. The Sun was still guessing at this when it went to print.
EDIT: Note that this post dates from the original outbreak, not the one making news in late 2010.
The potential risks associated with any flu epidemic shouldn’t be taken lightly. People have already died in Mexico, of course, but so far I don’t think there have been any deaths elsewhere – and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
But the situation is obviously being taken very seriously by the authorities. Yesterday, the World Health Organisation (WHO) announced that a “pandemic was imminent “. You can see a news report and read about it here.
In addition, UK television has a new advert – which I saw for the first time this morning – aimed at trying to contain any possible outbreak. You can’t help but wonder if a mere tissue and washing your hands is going to be enough if you generate as much snot when you sneeze as that guy in the clip.
Of course, The Sun is laying it on with a shovel as usual. In today’s paper copy it announces:
Yesterday a red alert was issued across the planet **” as the boss of the World Health Organisation warned chillingly: “The whole of humanity is under threat in a pandemic.**
Still no mention of the fact that every case so far in the UK has been as a direct result of travel to Mexico. No cases yet of human-to-human transfer. Oh, and unless it is a typo, notice that the WHO spokesman actually said “in a ” pandemic and not “of a ” pandemic. The Sun specialises in this kind of detail. Specifically: ignoring it. Mind you, the WHO is guilty of hyping this up big time.
The Sun also trumpets:
Britain now has EIGHT confirmed cases of the deadly virus.
It isn’t ‘deadly’. The WHO have pointed out that there have only been 8 deaths associated with it (not the 159 reported elsewhere) and all those have been in Mexico (7) and the US (1). This is also blogged by someone here – slightly older data. In the UK, those diagnosed a few days ago are apparently getting better. Bear in mind that in the US alone about 50,000 people die each year due to normal flu.
And on a lighter note, there is this new product available that might just offer the same level of protection.
Oinksip – For Swine Flu
For non-UK viewers, there is a product in the UK called LemSip (a lemon-flavoured drink containing basic painkillers and decongestants) which purports to get rid of colds and flu.
It remains to be seen how bad all this turns out to be. But at least the British can joke in times of trouble. My own opinion is that this is massive overkill by the media. Again. A couple of years ago we were all going to die from Bird Flu and we were only one step away from roasting anyone who’d been to Hong Kong over an open fire. And Bird Flu was actually deadly in 50% of cases. It’s also worth noting that the WHO at that time was saying a flu pandemic was long-overdue and that an outbreak of Bird Flu could lead to 2,000,000-50,000,000 deaths worldwide (that last figure is almost the entire population of the UK).
Of course, before that there was the Armageddon that was the Y2K bug (though that was largely avoided by a lot of work before it could do any harm). And Foot & Mouth Disease . And what about Salmonella in eggs? The media loves to imagine up doomsday scenarios.
I’ve heard that people are boycotting pork already. Idiots.
Parallels are already being drawn with Spanish Flu and the early 20th Century outbreak. No consideration of the fact that no drugs were available to treat illnesses then (many died as a result of pneumonia, and we have drugs to treat that) or that the general state of health was not the same as it is now.
Don’t worry! If it does turn out to be The End Of The World then there’s not a lot you can do. But for me? Well, I’ll be planning what I’m going to do for next year’s holidays, just like always.
There seems to be a worldwide conspiracy amongst vendors of this type of software – where you can analyse the log files which record who visited your site.
The software is either free (which also means that it has to be impossibly complicated to install and set up unless you wrote it in the first place), or you pay for it (which means having to rob a large bank in order to afford a version which comes even close to meeting some of your basic requirements).
I discovered this over the last two days. WordPress’s stats plugin started playing up, and I was confronted with a never-changing bar graph which showed absolutely meaningless data. So I began looking for something a bit more advanced. I started with the free stuff, like you do. I managed to find one or two open-source programs which didn’t involve downloading the source code, compiling it, and deploying it yourself (a lot of open-source stuff is extremely experimental). I managed to get some of them working, only to discover the authors appear to have a bar chart fixation (and a crap bar chart fixation, at that). Why is it that open-source programmers usually have absolutely no concept of neat appearance or ease-of-use? You inevitably have to install some obscure patch (or Java – and wade through the 3 million variants it exists as to get the right one, usually an older version because the open-source you are trying to use won’t run on the current version), and then find out it won’t work anyway!
After trialling a couple of free ones I quickly discovered their limitations. Probably the main one is that the log files my host provides contain the hits for all the sites I host on my webspace, and these freebies just take the whole file and process it without any filtering.
So I switched my attention to the ones you have to pay for. The cheapest one I found was about $70 – and that is not cheap at all, when you consider you can get fully-functional video authoring suites (for example) for less than half that price. But they nearly all exist in various versions: beginner, business, pro, and so on, and the one that has the features you might need is always one of the top-end versions – and the price now leaps to at least $150 and sometimes as much as £2,000
If you’re going to spend anything like this kind of money you want to try the software first, right? So with one of them I did. Everything was going perfectly smoothly right up to the not-so-insignificant part where I tried to run the 30-day trial for the first time:
You have altered your system clock to try and circumvent copy-protection. Blah, blah, blah!
No I bloody haven’t. I have just installed the program and run it for the first time and this message came up less than 5 seconds later. So have a word with Mr Uninstaller, and enjoy your duel with the Recession.
I did discover that many of these Commercial Thugs provide a ‘lite’ version (i.e. free), but I also discovered that the lite version is invariably totally useless – like buying a car, and finding out the free ‘lite’ model doesn’t come with an engine or wheels. Or a chassis. And maybe not even paint.
I installed a few others and got nowhere. Some simply wouldn’t run. Others were utter rubbish. In fact, I was unable to trial a single one that appeared to come even close to what I wanted – and they expect me to pay $150+ for this? Think again.
Anyway, WordPress seems to have sorted out the prolonged outage that it didn’t tell me about, so I can stick with that for a while longer. I suppose it did tell people somewhere or other. But unless you are more interested in talking about WordPress than actually using it I guess you’d miss it.
I was driving home and I’d stopped to make a phone call. The place where I stopped was right underneath the flightpath for incoming aircraft at East Midlands Airport.
You have to imagine the landing path running from left to right (basically, east to west). You usually see the planes banking in from either the north or south on the eastern (left) side of the flightpath as they take their turn out of the stack. At peak times there is about one plane every few minutes.
Well, at some time shortly after 8pm there was a plane travelling along the normal route from left to right (east to west) when another plane cut across from south to north. They were at the same altitude (judging by their relative sizes) and I can honestly say that they occupied less than an outstretched hand’s breadth of the sky. That is bloody close for a plane at such a low altitude, I’m sure.
Great gig on Sunday. Went to see Gary Moore at the Leeds O2 Academy with a friend who lives up that way.
Gary Moore was better than usual – lots of solos and extended pieces. He seems to get better as he gets older. But a bonus to the gig was the support act: Buddy Whittington.
Buddy is a blues musician – and a bloody great gutarist and vocalist, above all else. I must admit that when he came on stage his face looked familiar, but the name didn’t ring any bells. I think he was on a BBC show a few months ago with Eric Clapton. He has to be one of the best blues guitarists around at the moment.
He was also a really nice guy. At the end of his set he announced that his new CD was on sale at the merchandise kiosk. When I went over there it turns out he was there signing copies and chatting with people, so I’ve got a real keeper here, I reckon. It seems he does this at most of his gigs, which just reinforces what a decent bloke he is.
His album is on sale from Amazon here, and I really recommend it.
In all the years I’ve been eating them I have never come across a bad one. Well, not until recently. Oh, I’d heard of them – but I’d never encountered one myself.
For the last few years I’ve been eating free-range eggs. And I mean proper free-range ones: bought from a farm shop down in Wiltshire. I must have bought tens of dozens, and I had still never encountered a bad one.
Then, a couple of months ago, I bought 2 dozen and as I’d got to the last few one of them turned out to be bad. It was green inside, and the smell was indescribable.
Not to be put off, the last time I went past the farm I bought another 3 dozen. Big mistake: about a quarter of them appear to be bad. In fact, the one I cracked last night had a noticeable flat side to the egg shell. I guessed it was going to be odd before I’d cracked it.
It doesn’t half put you off.
I’m down that way again this week, so I’ll nip in and find out if they have a problem with their hens. Seems weird that after so many hundreds there should all of a sudden be such a high rate of bad ones.
This one has to be seen to be believed. The story, in The Sun, tells how a teenage girl (aged 12) was videoed punching and kicking a puppy she was supposed to be dog-walking. It was filmed by a neighbour who had already apparently witnessed abuse.
The fat little thug was believed to be an ‘animal lover’ and was going to be given a puppy as a pet. The worst part is where she kicks it in the head.
If the story is to be believed, her parents do seem half-decent and are shocked. They say she will not be getting her own dog now.
As the neighbour who filmed it is quoted as saying:
In a few years she might be a babysitter and who knows what she might do. I couldn’t believe it was able to walk after all she had put it through.
Quite right. This little bitch is tomorrow’s adult – if she can do this to a dog at 12, just think what she could do to her own children. This is one big reason why the country (and the world) is in such a mess.
EDIT: Although this post gets a lot of hits – even in 2013 – I can’t believe there are that many people out there who have heard of this pretty obscure story from a British newspaper from more than 4 years ago.
I’m thinking of removing it to stop attracting the obvious perverts out there who repeatedly search on terms like “woman tortures dog”. Seriously, if you came here for sexual gratification, I’d arrange to see a doctor urgently because you really need help!
For the last few years I’ve been eating free-range eggs. And I mean proper free-range ones: bought from a farm shop down in Wiltshire. I must have bought tens of dozens, and I had still never encountered a bad one.