This is going to be a long night

I've just been down to the pub where my brother in law is having his party with my sister to help stick a few balloons up.

The good news: They have some reasonable looking real ales on including a Copper Dragon (yay!) and Timmy Taylors' Landlord (oooer, that could be dangerous)

The bad news: On the way out one of the "guests" who said he would be "along later" left the pub at the same time. "It's a full moon, a fool moon" he said through a face that had been repeatedly beaten with the ugly stick.

"Are we expecting werewolves then" I said

"Oh don't worry about him" I was told, "He thinks he's James Bond. 007. Licensed to Shag"

This is going to be a very long night

You want me to put that where?

If you have a look down the left of the blog you'll come across a link to "Sitemeter" - a little gizmo which not only recalls the pitiful level of visitors to this blog but also tells me where people come from and if they come from Google what search criteria they used.

Normally the searches people use to end up here are, for reasons best known to the folks down in the Googleplex, variants on "dragon porn" sometimes with a "scaly" "hideously vile and fappable" thrown in. It's probably because I talk about dragons and porn a lot, though not usually together.

Anyway one search was for "Bad Dragon" - interesting I thought, who would be searching for that?

Apparently someone looking for this site (VERY VERY NSFW!! For the Love of Fafnir don't click on that if you're in any kind of public space!)

And what do Bad Dragon make? Well they make these:



That's called "The Ridgeback"... guessed what it is yet?

No, we'll its modelled on this, specifically the bits of this that I pixellated out (uncensored version on their site)...



Yes, it's a dragon dildo.

It comes in three sizes: small, medium and large and "large" is 12 inches long and 9.5 inches in circumference.

Normally something with those dimensions has a stamp on it somewhere that says "This side towards enemy" and is shoulder launched.

Go to the site, go on you know you want to! They do sea dragons and griffins as well.

You know what. If I get any kind of bonus this year I am going to buy the Ridgeback in Large and Vivid Red and stick it on top of the computer* and when anyone comes round the lair and asks I'll say "That what I blew the bonus on that I got from the bank the taxpayer owns. Yes every single taxpayer in the country contributed towards my twelve inch long fake plastic dragon cock."




* You didn't think I was actually going to use it did you? Oh, you did. Right.

Bit of admin

Made a few changes to the stuff over on the left, new blogroll and so forth and regrettably pruned a couple of dead blogs off the list including "Whiny God Botherer" who it seems has been in a reality-vs-catholic-dogma collision and has stopped blogging altogether.

If you read this blog and have one of your own and fancy a link just let me know.

Ecological travel fail

OK so next weekend I have a birthday party to go to in the wild and forbidding land of Lancashire, my brother in law's 65th as it happens which is in a pub somewhere so I get to stand around with a whole load of people I don't know trying to get bladdered on some godawful nitrokeg crap.

I thought that rather than driving up on Saturday morning I could maybe take the train from London after work and then back to my place behind the water-pipes in Norfolk sometime on Sunday. Turns out I can so long as I fancy six hours on a train and changing at Hebden Bridge, Leeds, Peterborough, Ely and frigging Narnia Parkway on the way home but for the privilege of this they want to charge me over 160 quid. And that's second class. And gods help you if you miss one of those connections because you'll be well and truly screwed.

According to google maps it's 199 miles door to door and takes three and a half hours. So even if I take the 2 litre 210 BHP Saab I'm looking at 60 quid in fuel - everything else is sunk cost as I've paid the tax, insurance, maintenance etc. by just having the car.

So 100 quid cheaper than the train, I go and come back when I want, it's quicker, is door to door and I don't have to take a chance on sitting next to some pissed-up Glaswegian on the journey up.

Bit of a no brainer don't you think. Sorry planet, you're fucked.

The latest crop of whining gits...

... camped out outside the office and sticking it to the man



Christ alone knows what they were campaigning against, the pitiful placards said something about "Real Jobs" and I am assuming PCS is some union or other, probably for people with nice cushy public sector jobs and wanting all bankers strung up by their goolies whilst simultaneously failing to realise that if we disappear so does all that taxpayers money... ah, you're probably net consumers of tax money anyway so like you fucking care.

But don't worry guys, we're doing a bang up job ourselves of screwing up Banko di Haggis. We are actually hiring, we have budget to do so (wow!) and my team lined up a guy to do some front-end stuff...

... only to be told we can't hire him as we haven't filled out quota of hiring people in India yet and when we have filled our Indian quota then we can hire people in the UK.

We're owned by Gordon Brown remember? Remember "British Jobs For British Workers" Gordon?

Jesus fucking Christ on a pogo-stick.


(PS: drop me a comment if you can write C# and fancy working alongside a fire breathing lizard with an attitude problem in an organisation that's a national pariah for destroying Curly Wurlys)

Consult the book of armaments

Armaments, chapter 2, verses 9 to 21




Well not quite, but it seems that some company who makes rifle telescopic sights has been putting coded bible verses on their hardware:

One of the citations on the gun sights, 2COR4:6, is an apparent reference to Second Corinthians 4:6 of the New Testament, which reads:

For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

Firstly if I saw 2COR4:6 on a bit of military kit I'd just assume it was part of a batch number or something but I'm really curious as to what the hell that quote has to do with the item in question - unless it has some clever way of illuminating the target.

The usual suspects have been banging on about how this gives ammunition to the Taliban, Al Kibble and all the other swivel-eyed rugbutters who say that this is a "crusader army" against muslims. Well yes, that's because that's exactly what this is so we might as well dip the bullets in pig fat before firing them (hey it worked before!).

Also on the American based forums where this got a mention the general consensus is that Trijicon sights are actually really rather good (Blackpowder - can you confirm?) - maybe Jeebus wasn't averse to a little duck shooting on his days off, I guess being able to walk on water comes in handy when you're wildfowling.

Shouln't have sold it then, should you.

Aw diddums, the Cadbury family are all upset that some yank multinational purveyor of crappy nom has taken over their old family firm.

The Cadbury family today launched an attack on “asset strippers” Kraft after the US maker of Dairylea cheese sealed a £12billion hostile takeover.

Felicity Loudon, great granddaughter of George Cadbury, said: “For us to sell out to a company that doesn't bear any resemblance to us at all is a horror story. Kraft won't understand the history and quality of the company.

“Kraft will have to asset strip to afford this. They will cut corners, they will sell out. To me they are a plastic cheese company and this is the jewel in the crown.”

Well you, my dearest Felicity, did not sell out to Krapt, these people did.

Roger Carr
Chairman

Todd Stitzer
Chief Executive Officer

Andrew Bonfield
Chief Financial Officer

Dr. Wolfgang Berndt
Independent Non-executive Director

Guy Elliott
Senior Independent Non-executive Director

Lord Patten
Independent Non-executive Director

Raymond Viault
Independent Non-executive Director

Baroness Hogg
Independent Non-executive Director

Colin Day
Independent Non-executive Director

... collectively know as the board of directors of Cadbury PLC. Not a single Cadbury among them because, my dear Felicity, at some point in the company's past your ancestors took the company public, trousered a fat load of cash and from that moment it wasn't "your" company any more.

Not that I care anyway as I never eat the vegolate that they produce anyway, unless it's 70% cocoa solids and/or comes from Belgium it doesn't get past the fangs. The only good thing I can think of is the Caramel Bunny who was, to be fair, seriously hot.

But just when it can't get any worse guess which eeeeevil nasty bank helped fund the deal...

Royal Bank of Scotland risked public outrage today over its role in funding Kraft's GBP11.9 billion bid for Cadbury.

Yay! Go Banko Di Haggis! Cue the fathead politicians...

Vince Cable, the Lib-Dem Treasury spokesman, branded involvement by the bank “a scandal” and said: “This is not what a nationalised bank should be doing.”

Labour MP Khalid Mahmood, whose Birmingham Perry Barr constituency includes a lot of Cadbury employees, complained to the Chancellor, arguing that RBS should be supporting British business.

Vince, B di H isn't nationalised, we just happen to have UK PLC as a majority shareholder and Mahmood, get down from your minaret and attend to me: The duty of RBS is to it's shareholders, that would be me and the rest of the 50 million fuckers you extort tax from, to pay back our money and they do that by being profitable and funding this little escapade is probably going to go some way to helping that along.

It's not as though Cads were exactly looking after the poor downtrodden British worker as they have in the past closed plants in York, Blackpool and made severe cutbacks in their Bristol operation (can't find the reference but it was on the Beeb's site).

Now, where did I leave that bar of Green and Blacks.

Twatter

Now you lucky people can keep up with Grumpy on the move. Simply click on the "twatter" icon to the left to get little micro-grumps and random motherfucker torchings as they happen.

You lucky people.

I can't believe it's not yellow chemical gloop

You probably saw reported on the news yesterday that another self appointed health-fascist by the name of Shyam Kolvekar has decided that his job of heart surgeon paid for out of my taxes is far to time consuming and interferes with his game of golf or rug-butting at the mosque or something and that butter should be banned.

Yes, that butter, you know the yellow stuff that comes out of cows, the stuff that mankind has been making and consuming since we first domesticated Daisy and Buttercup.

OK so there's the predictable backlash from the Daily Mail, the usual suspects in the blogosphere and, well, me.

Ok so he's never going to get the ban is he but it's an event with a quantum probability of close to 1 that some wanker in government is going to go "we need to discourage people from eating butter for their health so we are going to put a minimum price on cow products like butter, cream and the bullshit that spews from my mouth" of course like the minimum price on alcohol that's surely coming it will not be too punitive, yet... but once they have it, and they will, just watch it ratchet up year on year until the only way to get something tasty on your toast is to keep your own cow - assuming you can and the EU haven't made that next to impossible thanks to tons of restrictive legislation. Of course it's all for your own good.

The reason these twats get away with spouting this ordure is, I am increasingly convinced, that we have the NHS. You see as the state provides healthcare the state gets a say in how we, as individuals, manage our health. What they forget is the I fucking paid for the NHS though the 50% of my sodding income you take from me by force so if I want to eat a packet of sodding Lurpack washed down with a bottle of 12 year old Glen Cirrhosis then you can fucking well treat me using the hospitals and doctors I bastard well paid for.

Well you could but there's no way I'll let you as I'm not being treated in your MRSA ridden pits staffed by nurses who barely speak English and got their qualifications by sending away five corn-flake packet tops. So despite having to pay for the NHS I have medical insurance so if something happens at least I stand a chance of leaving the hospital without having acquired several opportunistic infections.

Anyway, back to Dr Bansturbator, he has 18 holes to play at Wentworth Park so let's not keep him waiting. Tell me doctor who are you working for...

Mr Kolvekar's comments were issued by KTB, a public relations company

And KTB are also the PR Company for?

a public relations company that works for Unilever

And besides soap and toothpaste what do Unilever make?

Unilever, the maker of Flora margarine

Riiiight.

But there's no link...

a KTB spokesman said there were no financial ties between the consultant and Unilever and he was not receiving any payment. 'These are his views,' added the spokesman.
The surgeon timed his comments to coincide with the Food Standards Agency's campaign to promote the virtues of low-fat milk.

So why the fuck is he not saying "try your latte with semi-skimmed, it tastes nearly as good"? Of course there will be no direct link, no big fat wad of cash, but it's a bit of a coincidence don't you think.

Fuckers, torch the lot of them.

God to Haiti... it's all your fault

Well not God per-se, he has his followers to make pronouncements for him

Rev. Pat Robertson had some interesting thoughts as to why the earthquake struck the impoverished nation:

"And you know, Kristi, something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it.

“They were under the heel of the French, uh, you know Napoleon the 3rd and whatever, and they got together and swore a pact to the Devil.

“They said, 'We will serve you if you'll get us free from the French.'

“True story.

“And so the Devil said, 'Okay, it's a deal.’

“And, uh, they kicked the French out, you know, with Haitians revolted and got themselves free.

“But ever since they have been cursed by, by one thing after another, desperately poor.

“That island of Hispaniola is one island. It’s cut down the middle. On the one side is Haiti on the other side is the Dominican Republican.

“Dominican Republic is, is prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, etcetera.

“Haiti is in desperate poverty.

“Same island.

Incidentally Pat, a few dates to chew on: Napoleon III (20 April 1808 – 9 January 1873), Toussaint l' Overture (20 May 1743 – 8 April 1803)

So you can't even get you factual history right you loathsome pig fucking moron let alone the stuff that you made up!

And, pray tell, even if this libel that a few Haitians in the 18th century made a "pact with the devil" why does your "merciful" god decide on collective punishment (even we humans have outlawed that under our rules of war) not on the people who made such a pact, but on a metric fuckton of people living more than 200 years later! Pray tell me, Pat, why your god thinks that this...



... and a hundred thousand other incidents of similar horror, pain and suffering are justification for a bunch of desperate slaves yearning for their freedom making some "pact with the devil"... an event which an eminent scholar (and member of the JC fan club nonetheless) says never happened anyway

although the satanic pact idea is by far the most popular explanation for Haiti’s birth as a free nation, especially among Christian missionaries and some Haitian Church leaders, it is nothing more than a fantasist opinion that ultimately dissipates upon close examination.
- Dr Jean R Gelin PhD

In some ways its a shame there is no eternal punishment after death as Pat Robinson would surely be a shoo-in for having his genitals roasted on pillars of hellish flames for all eternity.



(Hat-tip to The Freethinker: http://freethinker.co.uk/2010/01/14/haiti%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%98pact-with-the-devil%E2%80%99-caused-devastating-earthquake-says-televangelist/

Rats not leaving sinking ship, official.

For some reason even though I am not a trader and am not on the floor in question this email plonked into my box the other day at work.

As you can see this manager seems to have heard of the concept of "motivational through co-operation" but has decided instead to subscribe to the Arthur Wellsley School of Leadership By Shouting, Shouting and Shouting Some More...

New Year - New Trading Floor Environment

The state of the Equities trading floor is, quite frankly, horrible. Despite frequent tidy-ups in the past, the floor has never looked particularly clean and tidy and this needs to change.

Two things are now going to happen.

First, on Friday there will be a clear out and tidy up of the floor by all Equities staff.

Secondly, on Saturday there will be a deep clean of the whole {floor} by the contract cleaners. Plans are also underway to change the carpet and redecorate in the near future.

In preparation for the deep clean everyone needs to:

Tidy their immediate work space/area both above and below the desks;

Remove all rubbish/shoes/gym kits/bags etc from under their desks;

Ensure any overhead storage is free from rubbish so it can be wiped down;

Remove all paperwork/rubbish from around the printer areas;

Get rid of all rubbish and place in the correct recycling bins;

Remove all (and I mean ALL food) from desk tops and either place in the kitchen cupboards or in your desk drawers. Please that you do not put the food back on your desk tops in the future. Why, you ask? Leftover food has been attracting rats to the floor. Yes, we now have rats.

To assist you all with the above, extra wheelie bins will be available on the floor from 08:00 on Friday morning. They will be clearly marked as to what waste they can be used for. We will have extra confidential recycling bins delivered to the floor for those who require them.

Should you have documents that require archiving please do so now. Your desk assistants should know how to arrange this.

I expect all desk heads to ensure these instructions are followed. Needless to say, I expect this to be taken seriously.

Refreshments will be served during the course of Friday afternoon.

Should you have any questions, please contact xxxxxx

First time I ever heard of rats boarding a sinking ship!



(Some details omitted and changed in an effort to protect the guilty - i.e. me for leaking this)

Run Away! Run Away!

SAVANNAH, GA (WTOC) - Some church members were able to make contact with their loved ones that are currently in Haiti.

At the Grace Church of the Islands church members were able see and talk to missionaries from their church using Skype. The group seemed upbeat given the circumstances, and none of them were injured during the quake. For parents being able to see their children during this troubling time is giving them new reason to hope.

"I knew he was fine because I had spoken to him by satellite phone last night, and I knew Athat the Lord was going to provide. He was faithful and provided, but it's still great to see him on the camera," said Mary Ellen Calderon, who has a son in Haiti right now.

Because of the limited access to Haiti, the missionaries are still unable to fly home. The church is trying to make arrangements, but it could still be days before they're able to leave the island.

Hang on just a minute, aren't you good Xtian folk supposed to be staying behind and helping out instead of scuttling back home?

I guess what with the locals rather preoccupied with digging their relatives out of the rubble, trying to find a not too badly contaminated puddle to drink from and trying to dodge the bullets that will soon start flying as what little civilisation their country had unravels into barbarism they would not really have the time or be that receptive to your happy clappy come Jesus wants you for a sunbeam message?

Hopefully they will catch you and use you for food before the church can get the Learjet into Port Au Prince internatonal to fly your flabby white asses out of there.

Port Au Wobble

Oh dear, that's going to take a bit of mending.



Hey you are the guys that created zombies, right? Well you've got bags of raw material to work with now so just get the magic powders out, see if you can find a chicken that hasn't been flattened by a house to sacrifice and off you jolly well go.

Well I guess Voodoo makes about as much sense as Christianity in Port Au Prince right now. The Christians tell us that God is omniscient (all knowing), omnipotent (all powerful) and, as I can't remember the Latin for "benevolent", hes "omnibenevolent" as well - they keep telling us that God loves everyone, personally and without reservation.

So how come Haiti is a big pile of rubble in the Carribean right now? How come there's thousands dead, hundreds of thousands injured, people slowly dying trapped under a hundred tons of masonry?

If we take this loving god who is willing to prevent evil but does not, then he is impotent. If willing and able but unaware, he is ignorant. If able and aware but not willing, he is malevolent. ¹ What he can't be is the the three things Christians claim for him otherwise Haiti would still be standing, it would not have the largest slum in the Northern Hemisphere and I would have a pink unicorn giving me a blow job as I write this.

Its said that you can't prove God does not exist.

I think I just did.




¹ OK so I paraphrased Epicurius - sue me.

Police State, we has it.

These two stories appeared side by side on the front page of the Beebs new site at one point this afternoon...



... and I think that it says everything you need to know about ZaNuLabour's Britain.

We are now a police state. The state can and will ban you for stating a point of view and you can and will be tried by the Star Chamber and not before a jury of your peers.

This is how it starts people. No-one is going to kick up too much of stink about Abdul Al-Weirdybeard and his gang swivel-eyed gang of loons getting banned - despite the fact that as far as I can see from their website (yes I had a look) and what's been reported I can't see that they have incited hatred (well no more than the BNP do) or been shown that they have associated with terrorists - and if they have bring that information into open court so we can all see that they have done so and not just on the whim of some ex-postman expenses junkie who's trying to look "tough" with an election coming up. Ditto our alleged criminal friends up before a juryless court. Sure the are probably a bit handy with the shooters (but they love their mothers) but the excuse for not having a jury trail was that it would cost "too much" to protect the jury - about 86 million they reckoned. Fucking hell how many BILLIONS did we stump up to bail out my employer? How many millions do we pour into the cesspit that is Africa every year straight that ends up in General Mwomomomoba's back pocket?

Oh sure the cockwallets in government will all be "oh these are extremes, very rare occurrences, don't worry these powers will hardly ever get used." Yes, and at the risk of falling foul of Godwins' Law I'm sure when the Nazis started passing those laws just to sort out "a few anti-social troublemakers who we know none of you like" nobody kicked up too much of a fuss or ever thought that one day the Sturmabteilung would be kicking down their door for daring to say something not so complimentary about the beloved leader and being hauled off for a quick show trial followed by a bullet to the head.

We do not live in a "creeping police state" - we are in a de facto police state where you can be imprisoned for expressing a view following a trail with no jury.

This is just going to get worse and worse. And I can't see CallMeDave making any moves to change it soon.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

Blimey it's a tad cold outside. I have to keep breathing on random motherfuckers just to keep warm.

Of course as soon as we have more than a few nanometres of snow the entire country grinds to a shuddering halt. Not your dragon of course who owns one of those evil planet destroying 4x4 so can negotiate the admittedly slippy and snowy roads we have whilst lesser mortals spin their wheels and slide around everywhere, much to the irritation of folks like me and no doubt Steve over at Natural Yoghurt (who drives a big bus and therefore will know how to drive in snow) when they pull out just in front of us forcing us to use the brakes which always makes the driving suddenly get a whole load more interesting.

And following on swift wings of a snowfall is the bleating in the dead-tree press about how crap we are in the snow and how come when there's so much as a snowflake the country just stops and how it's not like this elsewhere on the continent.

Well I can tell you that the latter is not true as I was in The Netherlands just before Xmas and they got a bit of snow, 10cm or so - all the trains stopped running and the guy from the ANWB (kind of like the RAC or AA but with clogs on) kept popping up on the telly saying "Aaarg! Roads blocked! Do not go out! Very dangerous! The sex shop in Groningen has run out of dog porn¹"

However listening to BBC Local Radio this morning the poor sodding presenters had to read out the entire list of closed schools - all 260 of them which was more than half of the entire county. Now this was for Norfolk which has hardly had any snow at all. The only time as a hatchling I can remember our school closing was during the oil crisis in the 70's when they ran out of heating oil for the boilers. Even in the last big snows in '81 I seem to remember trudging through the snow to school as the school buses were not running.

My guess is that if there is even a vague chance of Chaveera or Tyson falling over on a square millimetre of ice or the risk of "Anti Social Snowball Throwing"² which would lead, naturally, to some sleaseball chav chancer suing the LEA for millions the head teacher errs on the side of caution and shuts the place.

So school shut, mumsie and dadsie have to stay home to look after the brood and guess which childless little green dragon has to battle it in against ungritted roads and "emergency snow-fall timetables" with only a bobble hat on my horns.

Still the wuppies like it...












¹ My Dutch language skills are not exactly brilliant so I might have mistranslated that last bit.

² Seriously I heard the presenter on the local tv news say that yesterday, preceded by "Police had to be called to deal with..." Fuking Hell.

I'm dickhead... fly me

Budget airline Ryanair has been accused of being "puerile and childish" over its payment policy by business watchdog the Office of Fair Trading (OFT).

That would be the airline run by this cockwallet then...



... you were expecting anything different?

Wild horses could not drag me aboard one of Sky Marshal O'Leary's planes¹. No not because he's a twat of the first water or his planes are stuffed to overflowing with burberry clad apes or even, as this report on the beeb's website shows, by the time you've added on the mandatory booking fee, luggage handling fee, being allowed to actually board the fucking plane fee and probably an extra charge which you could have avoided if you performed a sex act with a rutting red deer stag under the port wing before take-off you've ended up paying twice as much as if you had booked with a proper airline.

No, it's because his airline is a menace to everything in the air, birds included.

I've had a couple of conversations with pilots and ATC bods over the years, one of the pilots a former RyanScare employee and he told me that although they stick to the letter of the law they certainly don't do anything that could be called "good airmanship" - pilots are under huge pressure to get the plane in on time and turned round very quickly so they come under pressure to cut corners, get snotty with ATC to get faster and better clearances and low or no hold times (that was confirmed by my acquaintance in ATC) plus there's nothing that can be proven but there's a culture of not erring on the side of caution if a technical fault should be reported - so if the ILS (Instrument Landing System) is not quite reading right but is legally certifiable or - as the ILS isn't a piece of mandatory equipment - it's not working then the fault doesn't get reported and the plane stays flying.

Let's take that ILS example, now ILS approaches are so accurate in a modern plane the plane can use the equipment to land itself in zero visibility, without it you can do other approaches to airports in poor weather but they are "non-precision" and take more work from the pilot. So you're on a crappy weather approach into somewhere surrounded by mountains that Ryanair called, lets say, "Bögbrush" but in reality is some not quite so well equipped airport about 80km from Bögbrush itself. Would you prefer your pilots to be flying a nice, straightforward CAT III ILS approach down to the runway or two stressed out guys, coming up on their max hours, battling with an NDB approach that has a way higher "Decision Height" than the ILS approach and knowing that they are going to get their arses chewed if they miss the approach and go-around delaying the flight?

And that's just in the cockpit. What's going on in the bits that you can't see on the aircraft, especially as all those nice shiny new 737's start to age. Would you think that an engineer working for Ryanair would go "Oh that SpongMonkey that holds the engine to the wing looks a little worn even though the book says it's good for another 6 months. I'll replace it just to be on the safe side, Mr O'Leary won't mind one bit."

Thought not.

Happy flying.




¹ which given I'm the one normally running towards wild horses with a bag of oats, a small stepladder and a smile, is something of an achievement for said airline.