Bent

Ooooh! New toys to play with at the dragon's lair. The nice people at Robinsons Equestrian send me a shiny new numnah - that's a special sort of cloth padded thing you put under a horses' saddle if you're not a horsey person - so on Saturday I try it out. All goes well for about half an hour but, in the manner of those "Countdown to Disaster" programmes you see on the Discovery Channel all is not well under the surface...

"30 seconds to disaster. Sunshine has been exercising for twenty seven minutes" says the narrator, probably that chap who does the voice over for Bob the Builder, "and she's getting sweaty. The sweat is starting to interfere with the numnah" whizzy zoom to computer graphic of blue bubbles rising from horses' back.

"20 seconds, Dragon opens the throttles and asks for a canter" cut to chariot race scene lifted from Ben Hur because we're doing the program on the cheap

"5 seconds, Sunshine enters the top corner of the meneage, the lateral forces are too much for the sweaty ProLite numnah and the saddle begins to rotate around Sunshine's tummy.

"Zero Seconds.... aaaaarrrrggg... crunch..... ooooh fucking hell I bet that hurts"

Yes it does. However in true horseman fashion I get the saddle off her (now completely upside down), get her back to her stable and wander off in search of Mrs D who I ask to check to see if I've broken anything... at which point I slide down the wall.

There are these blue flashing lights and three men in green uniforms.

I get myself onto a chair and they ask me lots of questions and make me wave my arms about and have a good old listen. From what they can see it looks as though I've probably cracked a couple of ribs.

"Well we can take you to hospital if you like" they say. "But you'll just end up sat around A&E, some doctor will look at you, they won't x-ray you or strap you up or anything and you'll be told to go home and take ibuprofen."

Marvellous, your NHS at work.

"Right we need you to answer some questions and sign a release if you're not coming with us"

This is fine, I tell them that I'm an avid follower of Tom's ambulance driver blog so I know the form.

"I'll get the computer" and indeed this ruggedised lappy shows up on which the paramedic starts tapping various check boxes and buttons. I get to play at one point with a button choice of my own which looks like this...

How do you feel?

  O  O         O   O         O    O        X    X
                              ____
 \____/        _____         /    \         ----

 Happy      Not so Great    Like Shit       Dead

Last time I saw something that inane it was on the wall of a bog in a motorway service station and asking my opinion on the cleanliness of the facilities. Are people really that thick they have to be show a smiley / frowny face to rate their pain score?

Either way 10/10 for the ambulance and paramedic crew who were really good (even though you missed your ORCON target... I won't tell!) and my doctor who I have seen once in the three years I've lived here and who could not see me today but left a load of diclofenac and paracodiene for me to pick up without even seeing him.

Sunshine? She's just fine!

Giggle

This is doing the rounds of the trading desks in The City yesterday... enjoy:

Subject: Statement by Soc. gen.

FRIENDS of rogue trader Jerome Kerviel last night blamed his $7 billion losses on unbearable levels of stress brought on by a punishing 30 hour week.

Kerviel hid his November losses in a batch of wonderfully fresh croissant

Kerviel was known to start work as early as nine in the morning and still be at his desk at five or even five-thirty, often with just an hour and a half for lunch.

One colleague said: "He was, how you say, une workaholique. I have a family and a mistress so I would leave the office at around 2pm at the latest, if I wasn't on strike. "But Jerome was tied to that desk. One day I came back to the office at 3pm because I had forgotten my stupid little hat and there he was, fast asleep on the photocopier.

"At first I assumed he had been having sex with it, but then I remembered he had been working for almost six hours."

As the losses mounted, Kerviel tried to conceal his bad trades by covering them with an intense red wine sauce, later switching to delicate pastry horns. At one point he managed to dispose of dozens of transactions by hiding them inside vol-au-vent cases and staging a fake reception.

Last night a spokesman for Sócíété Générálé denied that Kerviel was over worked, insisting he lost the money after betting that the French were about to stop being rude, lazy, and arrogant.

Dans La Merde, encore

Glad that I'm not working for a certain French bank right now.

French bank Societe Generale says it has uncovered "massive" fraud by a Paris-based trader which resulted in a loss of 4.9bn euros ($7.1bn; £3.7bn)

Ooopsie... that's going to result in a large number of very disappointed cheese-eating surrender monkeys come le jour de bonus

So what has our new Nicolas Leeson done to lose so much money? Well from what I can gather from the newswires pretty much the same thing as Nicky boy did in Singapore which brought Barings down and that is writing naked forward contracts. Basically (and simplifying a lot) what he's done is write a contract back in 2007 saying that he's going to buy 100,000 shares in Merde Inc from me at 5 Euros a share on settlement day, January 18th 2008. Now he's betting that the share price for Merde will be above that come the big day, we do our deal and he sells the shares for a profit. Now by writing the contract and selling it he makes a small premium but is now on the hook for a shitload of cash come expiry time. No problem if the stock markets are rising but then all those pesky yanks suddenly couldn't pay their mortgages any more and defaulted with the result that shares in Merde Inc were, well, down the toilette

Of course you would have thought that after the Leeson fiasco there would not be a single bank that would not have reviewed what happened, review and where necessary tightened processes and controls. I was working for a certain American investment bank at the time (the one with the biggest testicles in an organization's logo incidentally) and they sure as hell did; and very nicely I did out of it too with a big fat bonus for working on that project.

I guess over at Soc Gen they just did that stupid Gallic shoulder shrug and went off for a 3 hour lunch.

Won't be having Chateau Lafite with lunch tomorrow I'll wager.

Looks like a paedo to me!

You know if you asked just about anyone in the western world to draw what they thought a paedophile would look like I bet 99.9% of them would come up with something that looks pretty much like this.



About all that's missing is him wielding an axe and having a swastika tattooed on his forehead.

Clarence Mitchell, hired gobsite for the McCanns said:

"We want to know who he is and we want to know where he is. We want to know that as soon as we can."

OK let me see if I can give you a hand here. He is a figment of some deluded twat's imagination and he is located somewhere in the collection of neurons and ganglia laughably called a "brain" which is at present somewhere in the region of your anus. Is that soon enough for you, you fuckstain.

With the best will in the world some dippy old bint has seen some local down-and-out / con artist and concocted a picture based on a memory that is a good nine months old. Hells donkeys the police say that can barely get anything credible from eye-witnesses to actual crimes when they get to people nine hours afterwards and in any court of law there has got to be way more than eyewitness testimony to get a safe conviction because the police and courts are only too well aware of the unreliability of eye witnesses. And remember no-one apart from, conveniently, one of the McCanns' drinking buddies saw anyone "carrying" a child on the night her parents killed her Madeleine disappeared.

This is just another classic example of the McCann distraction bandwagon and it makes me want to puke. Unfortunately El Ploddo in Portugal made such a complete horlicks of the initial investigation that the chances of proving anything short of a body turning up are on a par with your green scaly friend being elected the next pope, so regrettably we are going to have to put up with these ghastly excuses for humans crawling out of the woodwork every few months with some latest Maddy "exclusive" bullshit.

Gits, the lot of them.

That will need more than a respray

I think he bent it.

Indulge me for a moment here as being a dragon I am rather interested in flight and what is more being a dragon with a PPL and over 200 hours on light singles and twins quite interested in how you humans do it too.

First of all that is a fucking awesome bit of flying. Now I've done glide approaches in light aircraft a few times (is part of the training) and they are not easy, now imagine doing one with all your avionics down in a plane with the glide angle of a cow three miles out and over a major city. That he got it to the field is incredible, that everyone walked away and they might even be able to use the plane again is a miracle.

But what the hell happened. When I heard he'd lost power and avionics I assumed that for some reason his engines had flamed out (electrical power is generated by the engines, they stop running and everything goes dark - normally a little engine in the tail, the APU, generates power on the ground) but now I read a passenger saying both engines were "screaming" when they went in so maybe they were running - given the lack of damage to the engine housings though I doubt that; maybe the screaming was his fellow passengers?

One thing I thing we can discount however is our wierdybeardy friends with their korans. Of course all the conspiraloons are coming out of the woodwork with tales of EMP (Elecro Magnetic Pulse) generators that can knock planes out of the sky and that the approach path is over several "immigrant" areas (of course it it - our capital is called "Londonistan" for a reason you know).

Yes EMP does exist and it can fry electronics. However the best way to generate an EMP pulse is to... let a small nuke off! If AlQuibble had nukes, they would not be using them to knock random 777s out of the sky I can assure you. Sure there are other ways but I really cannot imagine some bearded twat with a dishrag on his head has figured out how to make something that has eluded the finest defence contractors in the world using only components bought from Maplins and a capacitor the size of an elephant.

Gordon Brown's Kidneys

Apparently the state want to own your corpse after you die. Well rather they wish to strip it of any useful bits to give to whomever they choose once you croak. So now even when you die the taxes don't stop as they literally take a pound of flesh from you.

Now I've no problem with organ donation. I carry a donor card and am on the register as "help yourself to any bits that might be handy, I'm not going to need them any more." and it's nice to think that physical bits of me will live on when I'm not around - and to whoever gets my willy you are going to have a *great* time with that, but probably best not to ask where it's been.

What I do think whiffs though is that the state just thinks it can do whatever the sweet fuck it wants with our bodies. This is yet another example of how governments, this government in particular, has got it's relationship with citizens arse first. Let me explain this to any politico reading this in nice simple terms. We appoint you to do things which are best accomplished collectively rather than individually: enforcing property rights, defence, that sort of thing. In order for this to work we give up a minimal set of liberties to you. What we have not done is hand over all our liberties to you for you to hand back to us piecemeal as and when you see fit.

So my body remains my property and once I have breathed on my last moron or one of those pesky knights manages to land a lucky shot my body will pass on to whomever I fucking well want it to. It does not and never will be the property of the state.

Maybe I should add a clause in the organ donors register that nothing of mine may be given to anyone who has stood for political office.

Credit where it's due

And that certainly does not include my credit card company. It's January and hence time in the Dragon's lair to upgrade the PC and, being a modern sort of dragon I find that a credit card is very useful for paying things as it's a bit tricky getting online companies to accept baubles from the hoard. So I go off to my favourite website for all things computery and place an order for a new quad processor screaming death 'pooter of doom.

"Bring, Bring... Hello, look there's a problem with your order, the credit card company have declined your card."

Hmmm... I know it's good for the money and I used it a couple of days earlier, better call the bank. So after much round the houses I get put through to fraud and, apparently, my card has been "compromised" because I used it somewhere (they would not say where) where a card fraud too place. So no money had been taken off my card, it was still in my possession but the bank unilaterally decided to block it without telling me, not even an email.

However they will open it up for this transaction, provided it can go through in the next few minutes, after which my card is toast. Needless to say by this time PC supplier has buggered off to the Horse and Zoophile for a few well earned pints.

So no PC and no credit card.

The following day took the biscuit though, I ring them up to get a new card and it will take "up to 14 days".

"No it won't, I want it in five, tops"

"We can't do that."

"Do you have my account details in front of you. Would you care to take a look at how much I have on deposit with you?"

"Ah"

"So five days then."

"I'm sure in the circumstances we can expedite delivery"

"I know you fucking can because I designed a goodly proportion your card shipping system."

This is becoming more and more common apparently. Credit card companies are getting ticked off with paying for fraud so they are getting really twitchy and will shut down a card when you so much as pay for a bottle of wine in a foreign country.

Time to get a backup card methinks. Might move anyway and take advantage of some of those 0% on balance transfer deals.

At least he died happy

From the London Evening Standard...

A City trader who jumped to his death from the 19th floor of the Park Lane Hilton was driven to suicide by the pressures of work, an inquest heard. Credit Suisse employee Darren Liddle, 26, spent the night bingeing on cocaine and also drank alcohol from the hotel's minibar before falling 200 feet while his girlfriend looked on.

Well if you're going to go you might as well go whilst you're pissed as a rat and out of your tree on Columbian Marching Powder.

For the record your scaly green friend used to work for BigCo Credit Suisse and left after 18 months without waiting to pick up his annual bonus; yes it really was that bad, quite the most dreadful place it has ever been my misfortune to sit at a desk in. Honestly it it wasn't for the truly world-class sausage sandwiches they did on the 9th floor I would have left after a month. I'm actually amazed that they don't have to put netting around their Canary Wharf premises to catch the falling bodies.

Pirate this movie

Well now here's a motherfucking surprise...

Representatives of Madeleine McCann's family have spoken to an entertainment and media company about turning the story of her disappearance into a film.

I was wondering when the money grabbing scrotes that are the McCanns were going to see if they could get a film deal. I did kind of expect them to have the decency to wait a year or so before really going for the big bucks but I forgot, they don't have any.

Talks on a lucrative film deal were held amid concern the £1.2m fund dedicated to finding the four-year-old, who vanished in Portugal last May, is rapidly running out.

Yes, it's running out because even the most dippy grandmothers in the land who are normally the types who contribute to these kinds of appeals have worked out that there's not something a little bit fishy about the McCanns and their role in their daughter's "disappearance" but the piscene component rather approaches that of the entire Portuguese sea-going cod fleet in terms of fishyness. That mortgage on the new 5 bed detached pad isn't going to pay itself you know.

If this movie does does get made please can everyone pirate it to hell and back so that no-one pays a single penny piece to see it. Alternatively we could literally pirate the movie, don eye patches, start saying "Yarrrr... shiver me timbers" and make it walk the plank along with Kate and Jerry.

Back on the chain gang

Right, the tinsel is down, the tree is lying by the woodshed and awaiting dismemberment into kindling and logs and everyone can go back to eating proper food instead of one of Bernard Matthews' flavourless turkeys ("now with added H5N1!")

And as it is the new year our lords and masters crawl out from under their slimy rocks and try to persuade us with their "new and fresh ideas" that they know what they are doing and to trust them with yet more of our money which they will "spend wisely" and you know that they are just going to piss up the wall just like they did the last lot.

We'll just skip right over anything spewing out from the gob of any Labour party politician as you know it's going to be elephant shit of the first order by default but instead let's have a look at the latest idea from TheBoyDave which you can read about on the beeb's site here

Well it's a start I guess but it doesn't go nearly far enough which is par for the course really. Doing a bit more of a dig into the story it looks as though what is being proposed is the same model as was used in New York and which did take a goodly number of people off the dole but didn't save a whole lot of money in the end - and remember the USA has a system where your unemployment benefits end after a fixed time; no sitting on your arse in front of the Jeremy Kyle show in perpetuity over there. In the end when you look at it what the Tories are proposing is a bit of window dressing which is probably going to cost more than it saves but we might get the occasional tidier park and some favourable headlines in the Daily Mail¹ but you know, you just fucking know, that the workshy cunts who this is aimed at just won't turn up or if they do won't do any work or it will be of such abysmal quality that some other poor fucker will have to fix it later and there will be no sanctions or penalties against them - this is after all a government operation.

So here is the Grumpy Dragon solution to unemployment...

You get three months to find a job and you must prove that you are looking (records of letters sent to employers, notification letters for interviews, etc.) and after that if you want money from the state (i.e. me) then you work for that money and you are made to work properly, in other words you are treated as a proper employee and if you fuck up too often, don't turn up for work or consistently do a shoddy job then you are "fired" and your money is cut off. You'll get a couple of days off every other week to apply for jobs and attend interviews and, trust me, after a few days working on what I have in mind you will be applying for anything at all to get off the state dole.

Draconian? Yes of course it is, I'm a dragon.

Next week - fixing the disability benefits system by shouting "Pull yourself together you fuckwit" at people.




¹ Or not... today's headline is some cack about that dead airhead princess we used to have before she got in a car with a pissed up frog.