Chung Hai Fat Choy

Got this spam today...

一個傳授鳳陽法術的契機---讓你自學自修即能馬上能施展法術,令周邊的人驚嘆連連！馬上對您另眼相看!

now does anyone have any idea if this scumbag is

a) Offering to extend the length of my generative member
b) Telling me what a good idea it would be to invest in Guangzhou No 7 Firework factory
c) Trying to get $25million out of China

Or a combination of the three. Spammers... such fuckwits they are now sending me spam in a language I have no hope of reading! THanks you Gmail for having such good filters.

Turns out (thanks to the nice chaps at Systran that I'm being offered to be trained in the "Fengyang magic arts"...

Teaches the Fengyang magic arts the turning point---Let you study independently studies independently namely can be able to display the magic arts immediately, makes the peripheral person to exclaim in surprise again and again! Regards with a special fondness immediately to you!

Thanks but I seem to be able to manage to make peripheral people exclaim in surprise quite well already.

I'm really sorry

In the spirit of apologies Grumpy Dragon would like to take this opportunity to make a heartfelt apology for the actions of his ancestors who, in unenlighted past times, burned down peasant villages and forced kings to pay protection money in the form of any beautiful princesses that happed to be about the palace. We are very sorry for any distress the actions of my ancestors were caused, even though I wasn't even an egg at the time.

Not that you're getting a penny piece from the hoard in compensation you understand - and Gordon, no giving out my tax money to slaves' "ancestors" either, I am watching you know.

In other news it is good to see evolution in action - maybe this little theaving scrote should be put forward for a Darwin Award for removing himself from the gene pool before it had a chance to breed. However what's the betting that instead of it's scumbag parents being sent a bill for the cost of the search and resue operaton that they manage to successfully sue the boat's rightful owner for failing to secure it to the dock properly and thus allowing their little angel to thieve it in the first place.

Gumpy Dragon Reviews

OK so you get a letter that looks like this...

Dear Mr Dragon

Thank you for your recent telephone reservation. We have pleasure in confirming your booking commencing on the 24 November 2006 until after breakfast on the 26 November 2006.

We have reserved for you a Junior Suite with en-suite facilities, which will be at our Bed & Breakfast room rate of £130.00 per night.

We have also reserved for you a table for 2 in our Restaurant at 8.30pm on each night of your stay.

We look forward to welcoming you to The Crown Hotel and hope your stay will be most enjoyable.

Now I don't know about you but I've stayed in far too many hotels in my time and in hotelspeak "Suite" means "seperate bedroom and sitting room". Not at the Crown in Wells Next The Sea it doesn't, it means "bedroom with a little room next door with a single and a bunk bed crammed into it. Normally one calls this a "family room". Strike one.

Things though improve with a very nicely kept pint of Woodfordes Wherry and the restaurant was quite exemplary. Worth a visit for the food... so long as you can get a table.

Which on the next night, we couldn't. I noticed this as I sauntered up to the bar at seven when I caught a look at the reservations list and no little green dragon upon it. Much muttering by the bar staff who dissapeard to "sort things out"... bit later the owner trundles out with lots of apologies and had wringing explaining someone had "forgotten" to put us on the list. Now I know us brits have a reputation for not making a fuss but being of the green scaly fire-breathing persuasion I am not one of them. I pointed out that if I wanted a bar meal, I would have ordered one, if I wanted to sit in the bar and have the restaurant menu, I would have asked for that and a table had better be forthcoming toute suite (which would be more than your suites are). Me and Mrs Dragon are assured that they had an early arrival, they should be through by eight thirty and would we like a complimentary bottle of wine.

It got to nine and the bottle of wine was drunk... still no table. Now I may be a grumpy dragon but Mrs Dragon, although very sweet and nice most of the time - gives rides to little children, flies up trees to rescue stranded pussy-cats, that sort of thing - can make me look all pink and fluffy when it comes to grumpyness. She absolutley tore a strip of the owner, at just the right volume level that people could hear but not shouty-toys-out-of-the-pram level - just right so that people could know the hotel had cocked up but without spoiling their evenings. The owner, who wasn't very tall, seemed to shrink a couple more feet. I almost felt sorry for her, well, almost, but she'd rather taken the shine off what was for me and mrs D a very rare chance to get away for a weekend and in my book that's unforgiveable - for you this is just another day at the office, for me it's something special and you and your staff just arsed it up.

Anyway, around 9.30 we did finally get to eat and the food was again very good (but a bit rushed and we did have to have another little grumble about the attitude of a certain "waiter" (read "arsehole in 'surfer dude' beads who moves plate from kitchen to dining room" - which isn't really a waiter in my book).

We got dinner for free, but then again I would have expected nothing less.

The Crown Hotel Wells - OK as far as it goes but the details let you down. Double check your reservations before you travel.

Firey Dragon Rating - lukewarm:

Torchwood - There's Lovely.

In case you don't know Torchwood is the beeb's Dr Who spin-off series which is set in the present in Wales with a "UNIT" like organisation running about sorting out aliens in our back yard. It's post-watershed so they can show a bit of gore, flash a bit of naked flesh and say F**k without the asterisks. However it is very firmly billed as Sci-Fi.

Now to be fair the first few episodes were pretty tasty. Good effects for the budget, a cast who can act and good storylines. Unfortunately the wheels came off this week¹ and we ended up with some lame plot that looked like the bastard offspring of "Deliverance" and "The Hills Have Eyes" - I half expected to hear a Welsh version of "Duelling Banjos" (Duelling Harps? Duelling Close Harmony Singing?). However comparing it to those films overrates last night's episode which was more like a Herchell Gordon Lewis film (in fact it did rather resemble "Two Thousand Maniacs" come to think of it.)

Note to the BBC - this is supposed to be Science Fiction - you know that stuff that has things which are not of this world or set in the future. What you gave us last night was a horror movie - and a crap one at that.

Oh and whilst I'm here; Russel love, I know you're gay and all that but please can you knock off all the "love interest" stuff as well - we're all SciFi geeks out here and we're not interested in that romance bollocks. If we were we'd watch Sex In The City or Friends or something else girly. I mean take a look at the "Fan Comments" on the fansite I linked to FFS! There's loads of chick-lit TV about so for the Invisible Pink Unicorn's (PBUH) sake please go back to giving us TV geeks can watch!



¹ I get my Torchwood of a Wednesday evening - I'm busy on Sundays.

FarePrats

Yes, yes, yes, poor little poor people swindled out of their Crimbo savings by nasty company and their fat-cat bank now what are the little mites going to eat for Xmas dinner cue footage of upset looking bairns clinging to mummys skirt whilst mummy looks anguished.

Bollocks. Look if you're stupid enough to stick your money into an unregulated savings vehicle with no backup then quite frankly you deserve everything you get. We have these wonderful things called "banks" and they will, surprisingly, let you pay money how often and whenever you want and when you come to take it out, which you can do at any time, you will find that they will give you back more than you put in. Even better they will not charge you one penny piece for this service! If you don't trust banks then you can save using a Credit Union (who'll even let you borrow money). If in 2006 you are too stupid, ill-disciplined or idle to open some sort of bank account then you are getting no sympathy and certainly not a bean from me - no matter how much little Duwaine and Chaveera's eyes well up with tears when a camera crew hoves into view.

What really sickens me though is the sight of politicians eager to show that they "care about the poor" by alternatively slagging off and whining at the banks to give money to the feckless fools caught up in the "crisis" (the only crisis here being the stupidity of Farepak's former clients). If they feel so bloody bad about it then why don't they take their noses out of the Whitehall trough for a few moments and donate that month's expenses to "the cause". The spineless banks and retailers are nearly as bad and most have given something - hang on a moment chaps, I own shares in at least two of you and that is my dividend you are piddling up the wall.

Look, if you reward stupidity how do you expect people to get smarter? Choices have consequences - or they should have - but it seems that these days, they don't... in debt, can't pay... don't worry you you don't need to

Jesus Loves You (eveyone else thinks you're a ****)

After Monday's decision, she said: "I am fairly disappointed but I'm looking forward to the next stage because the cross is important and the truth will be revealed. It is important to wear it to express my faith so that other people will know that Jesus loves them."

Look you whiny bint, You are paid by your employer to check in my bags, allocate me seat 7F and hand me my boarding pass. If I wanted to know that "Jesus Loves Me" then I'd tottle along to whatever church / mosque / synagogue / gurdwara / holy-bar-and-grill-of-the-Invisible-Pink-Unicorn (PBUH) was dispensing hugs from imaginary friends that week. British Airways, unless they have started to offer a selecton of proselytising and non-proselytising sections in their 747's and Airbuses these days, do not pay you to spread your cack on their dollar. Nine to Five they own your sorry bum and if they want you to dress up as Barney the Purple Dinosaur then that's the gig - that's what you signed up to. I'd like to wear my comfy disgusting trainers to work but my employers won't let me - I have a choice, find another contract or put sensible shoes on; that's my choice and I don't go bleating to the papers about it. The only "Truth" that is about be revealed is your name looks great on a P45

And don't give me the "but Mrs Said over there can wear a headscarf", so, lots of ladies (of my mothers age, sure) wear headscarves, it's a good way to keep your hair from being blown about; so long as it does not have "Bow down to Mohammed or Burn In Hell Infidel" written on it I can't see the problem. Turbans... bit of a grey area but as it's a cultural thing maybe we can let that pass - the Sikhs aren't trying to ram the Guru Granth down my throat, it's just something they all wear, bit like they're all called "Lion".

There's bog all cultural about wearing a cross. Quick look around the carriage of the 6.15 from King's Lynn and I can't see anyone looking like Lord and Lady Whiteadder. You're just doing it to make a point that your grumpy sky god is better than anyone else's grumpy sky god.

Oh and you're ugly as well.

Your correspondent

Just in case you wondered what I looked like, this is me in one of my happier moments...

Don't tell The Sun

http://www.guardian.co.uk/crime/article/0,,1950320,00.html

Now that's going to work. Not.

Tell you what, whilst we're at it why don't we hook up satellite tracking to that "Star Wars" tech that Ronnie Reagan was having developed and if a peedofil goes within five kilometers of anyone under the age of 16 he gets zapped by a space-based gigawatt laser.

Hope that the stupid bint who edits The Sun doesn't read this or that idea will be in the next Queen's speech as Gordon Brown (texture like sun, lays me down, with my cash he runs - and spends it on Iraqis) as he frantically chases the chavvy lock-'em-all-up-and-throw-away-the-key vote.

Mind you on the peedofil panic, at least we had someone, and a chief copper at that who normally talk complete horsepoo, saying something that actually made sense - to of course the predictable howls of anguish from the Tyrrany of Children brigades who would probably like nothing better than to wire everything male over the age of 12 to the traking laser of doom mentioned earlier.

Fly me to the Zune.

I did read somewhere that the people who named Microsoft's new wonder I-Pod killer media gizmo didn't really do their research properly and "Zune" is a word for the male generative member in French Canadian - which adds a whole new interesting meaning to "Est ce que vous desirez d'ecouter a mon Zune?".

Not that I can see anyone with half an ounce of sense buying one anyway. The killer feature is that it can "share" music! W00t!! Sounds great until you realise that sharing means you have three days to listen to the tune that your friend has shared with you and then it dissapears (ditto if you have the temerity to actually like it and listen to it or even a part of it more than three times) and you can't share anything anyone has shared to you. This is advertised as "Welcome to the Social" which, if you're from the North, rather sounds like you're going down the local workies club for a cheap pint.

To be honest if Micro$oft have had any sense they will have made this share feature really easy to crack so kids will buy it and share all their downloaded MP3s with their mates - M$ don't lose out as they're not a music company and everyone trades in their I-Plods for Willies Zunes. Of course Microsoft can claim that this is just another in a long line of security flaws for which they are famous and not deliberate at all.

On the same thread... how long do you recon before the first Zune virus.

Rubbish

Following on from yesterday's gripe about our Glorious Leader's plans to make criminals of us all I also notice that we're all going to have to save the planet as well. Aside from garotting everyone in the house of commons which would surely reduce the amount of global warming, what with all the hot air those monkeys produce, I suppose that this means that folks like me are probably going to have to shell out more in "green" taxes that are supposed to make me act more "environmentally responsibly" whatever the feck that's supposed to mean.

OK so pray tell how I'm supposed to get to and from work? I use the train but the station is ten miles away. Use the bus? Where I live has three buses a day the nearest stop for which is three miles from my house so that's not going to work. Cycle? I leave for work at six in the morning so if you think I'm up for a bracing ten mile morning bike ride at five in the morning you can go and fornicate yourself.

I recycle, not because I think it's a great idea but becuase my local council to whom I pay a grand and a half for and get bog all back in return only give me a piddly little wheely bin and all my crap doesn't fit in it so all the plastic and paper and anything else I can reasonably get away with all goes in this box for the once a fortnight collection if they can be bothered. I watched the "recyling contractor" one week... he just chucks everything in the back of a bin wagon and I'm 100% certain it goes in the same landfill as the crap from my wheely bin that was emptied moments earler as no attempt is made to sort it and I'm sure half the stuff I put out can't be recycled anyway. To be honest it's probably better that it does get dumped in a landfill, the paper stuff anyway as at least that'll rot down and I bet it costs just as much in terms of "carbon footprint" to make paper out of old paper as it does to make it out of new trees. And hey it's not as though we're exactly running out of trees - we just plant new ones which slurp carbon dioxide out of the air as they grow. Net-net recycling paper is probably bad for the environment. And it costs more.

Sure, there's a global warming problem that needs addressing and, as someone whose house is 2 metres above sea level I would like to see it addressed. But footling around with piddly little kerbside recycling schemes is just making dim people think they are making a difference and distracting them from the real issues. You putting your Sunday suppliments out won't help, what will is a whole bunch of really unpalatable changes (and not some arsey little green tax which won't change your behaviour one jot, just make you poorer) like wholesale changes to the whole economy so people work locally to where they live and the environment instead of shareholder profit becomes the primay business driver, massive curbs on travel and transport of people and goods (no more Ugandan kumquats for you matey!) and somebody going off to China and India and saying "You know we had all that lovely economic growth, rises in living standards and life expetancy over the last couple of hundred years and now you want the same, well I'm afraid you can't. Sorry."

And lets face it, that's just not going to happen is it.

I'd best invest in some water wings. In the meantime, I'll carry on driving this, thanks very much.

Ihr papieren ist nicht in ordnung! Kommen sie bitte mit uns!

So the Dear Leader is pressing ahead with his crackpot schemes to introduce ID cards which will of course make us all safe from those nasty terrorists - who are all home grown and would have them - and those nasty illegal immigants - who will work the black economy anyway and will get hold of forged ones and for the rest of you they will come in handy when plod come to turf you out of your house to prove that you really are who you say you are. "I am not a number!" Yes you are if Stormtrooper Tone gets his way. What's the betting that folks like me who'll never have to use an "entitlement card" will end up coughing up twice as much as they are currently saying this will cost because (a) it's a government project and the costs will overrun and (b) they will have to give them free to the "disadvantaged" dole scroungers who will need to flash them when claiming their benefits and I'll be subsiding that.

So what else do we have. Some token "Green" effort which sounds like yet another backdoor tax; how about shoring our sea defences up ... oh you can't you've spent all the money to defend us from the real threat of a North Sea surge on defending us from that fantasy threat in Iraq. A promise to lock you up of you might be a little bit fruitcake (well that at least will keep Mrs Dracunculus (who works with looney-tunes) in gainful employment), yet more power for Kommisar Ken and his campaign against anyone with two pence to rub together and the mandatory installation of CCTV in every room in your house - after all if you've nothing to hide why would you object?

Oh and the icing on the cake is that we're going to get a law banning the posession of "Extreme Pornography". This one looks madder than a bucket of eels* with plenty of opportunities for people's lives getting thoroughly f*cked up as what is regarded as "Extreme" was battled out in the courts. This has all the hallmarks of a badly thought out bit of knee-jerk playing-to-the-tabloid-gallery politics - a Dangerous Dogs Act with willies. "Extreme" changes all the time so how you would even begin to draft such a law baffles the imagination and it would be left for the courts to interpret. Anyway how would you enforce such a law? One of my relatives is in the police at a fairly senior level and tells me that they can barely cope with trying to investigate child porn - which is illegal pretty much everywhere so they get lots of co-operation from overseas plods - and it's well documented that the fabled "Operation Ore" had about three to four years backlog of people who they *know* downloaded very illegal stuff that they haven't even got to seeing yet. Can you imagine what will happen if they now have to chase every iternet user who might have looked at a naughty picture that might or might not have been "Extreme" and trying to get co-operation from a plod in, say, Amsterdam, who goes "No, the bucket of eels thing is OK here, I'm afraid we can't be forcing the website owner to send you anythinks."**

The real danger with the above though is that some senior reincarnation of "God's Copper" will announce a purge on "Internet Filth", lots of recources will be diverted to his "cause" which means some poor granny will get her head smashed for the two pounds thirty seven in her purse and a bunch of child molesters get away uninvestigated whilst plod is busy yelling "Do you recognise this fish!" as some poor bloody schoolteacher.

Ja, mit der Insel Affen, alles is nicht in ordning!


* I seem to recall seeing some porn featuring a bucket of eels once.
** That's funnier if you read it in a dutch accent.

Sex, Lies and Videotape

I see that the former head of Channel 4 is getting all upset because he thinks that his old channel is getting all obsessed with sex because they are going to be showing a programme about willies sometime later this month. Hang on - wasn't this the man that brought us the "Little red triangle" series of late night arty subtitled films with a bit of boob and bum on show and stuck a red triangle in the corner to "warn" us that the movie had some sex in it which only served to (a) wind up Mary Whitehouse and (b) cause people like me to try and watch some inpenetrable piece of dadaist filmmaking in the hope of catching a flash of tit? Hey at lest they used to commission some very good pieces of TV about sex - "Pornography - A Secret History" and the documentary on Zoophilia spring to minds as two examples (only cos' I saw these pop up on one of the satellite channels recently). At least these were insightful, intellegent, treated the viewer as though they posessed an average collection of grey matter and you went away feeling that you had at least learnt something.

If Jeremy Isaacs wants to have a pop at Channel 4 he might start with why their programming now seems to cater for the IQ of 80 and attention span of a goldfish with altzheimers demographic. Two examples present themselves, starting with the new series "Codex" shown on sunday evenings. Me and Mrs Dracunculus thought we'd give this a go "OK so it's a game show and it looks like it's designed to cash in on the cacky book by that Brown guy but Tony Robinson's doing it and it's in the British Museum so it might be a interesting."

Wrong! What we get is "Here is the Standard of Ur, it's really, really old and we're giving you the privalege of standing closer than the public ever get (dimbulb contenstants proceed to gawk at artefact for a few seconds before working out the figures don't move or sing Britney Spears songs and is therefore not interesting) so now we're going to play... spot the difference!" The "codex" turns out a simple substitution cypher which I'd solved in my head using basic frequency analysis (the fact they'd left the apostrophies in made life a bit easier) by the time the second set of clues were given; you really would have to be a complete moron not to get this - fortunately the team playing only had one complete moron, a "part time model" who thought the total length of the Tigris was 190km. Jesus wept - this was truly, truly pitiful and I cannot for the life of me think who would want to watch this. I mananged to stick the car-crash out to the end but can think of more interesting things to do with a sunday evening - like watch paint dry.

Then monday we get served with a documentary in which C4's researchers rounded up the most rabid bunch of little englanders, xenophobes and racists they could find (within 20 minutes of Horseferry Road presumably - they were on a budget), let them spout on for a few minutes on what you have to be to be English (which prediciably came down essentially to "be white") and then they gave them a DNA test which showed their genetic makeup to be from all over the place with a preponderance of south eastern European (apart from the idiot woman who claimed you couldn't be English unless your family predated the "genocide" of William the Conqueror - tactfully glossing over the fact that the Angles and Saxons didn't exactly wander into a vacant country and maybe that nasty business with those Romans - and who turned out to be 100% romany gypsy and then promptly tried to sue the producers for calling her a pikey). The thing was this was really lazy television, a "let's have a laff at the racists" hour. No attempt was made to explain or explore why it was that these folk who did have British born ancestors turn out to have DNA from all over Europe if not the world (the clue is in those Romans and Normans (guess where the Goths* ended up settling after sacking Rome) coming over chaps). Nope, all we got was "have a gawp, feel a bit of schadenfreude as the bigots get shown up on the telly, feel superior about yourself and go to bed".

Quite franky, get rid of this sort of crap and replace it with something that doesn't treat me like a remedial pupil and you can have all the programmes on bums and willies you like.



* that's Goths as in "Aleric the..." not "Sullen youth wearing black pixie boots and listening to Fields of the Nephilim".

Grumpy Dragon Cleared for Takeoff

Not sure how this one will go but this is going to be my not-work blog. The anon work blog is over here but I wanted a place to have a rant about the slow, inexorable tide of cack that seems to wash over everyone, but in particular me, in Tony Blairs wonderland.

And I'm particularly grumpy that someone has already nabbed "grumpydragon.blogspot.com" but hasn't even bothered to post an entry. Shane, whoever you are you're an arse, people like you shouldn't be allowed access to computers.