Grumpy Dragon

Do you wanna be in my gang?

2012-01-24T08:11:00.001Z

If you're on Twitter you can't help but have noticed last week the Twitterati throwing what I like to call a "twitfit", an outpouring of sturm und drang in 140 characters because former glam rock musician and convicted pedophile Gary Glitter had popped up on the popular microblogging site to announce a comeback tour.

As you would expect there were plenty of your standard neanderthal "Kill all peedofils they is scum, innit" tweets the majority were of the "Ew, throw this man off Twitter. Why doesn't somebody do something!" flavour... which as it turns out was exactly the point the troll who created the fake account was aiming for. In a statement this person, whoever he is because with a sense of irony he posted his manifesto anonymously, said he'd created the stunt to highlight that "OK you know Glitter is a pedo but how many more are there on the net that your kids are talking to that you don't know about" and calling for anyone on the sex offenders register to be disallowed use of the internet in perpetuity and an end to anonymity on the net.

And so yet again we see that leader of the four horsemen of the infopocalypse, the eevil nasty peedofil, being trotted out into the arena and performing a few half-passes and 20 metre circles at canter for the benefit of the sheeple who all cheer when some scumbag politico then pipes up "You see there, peedofils! That's why we have to take away internet anonymity!".

Of course on a fully registered internet we know what you read, where you go, what you say. Back in your pens sheep, we wolves in Parliament know what's best for you and if you dare to say different well, off to market with you.

Another thing that got me thinking as a result of this was do we actually believe in a rehabilitative justice system? Now I hold no brief for the kiddy fiddlers (and quite frankly can't bloody stand children) but do we as a society believe that old canard about "having paid your debt to society" and once a criminal has served his sentence he is a free man with a clean slate? It would seem to me that in the case of one faded rock star in particular, we clearly don't.

When I want your advice I'll ask for it

2012-01-10T18:08:00.002Z

Oh what fun. Just when you thought we actually had got rid of the NuLabour nanny state do as I say bollocks up pop BlueLabour with a tick-the-box-your-government-knows-best bullshit scheme where all NHS staff have to lecture you to promote "Good Health" every time you have the misfortune to come into contact with you.

Now we all know this is going to be a box ticking exercise like the last lots' "Quality of Outcomes" shit. As an example of what will happen here I give you Mrs Dracunculus. She was at the doctors today, routine visit for a long standing complaint just to review, make sure its not getting worse, check the ongoing medication and tweak as necessary. Now she gets five minutes of the doctors time in which he has to do this and she informs me that five minutes was fully used. But in the future three of those five minutes is taken up with a stern lecture from Dr Mopp about how the glass of Sauvignon she likes of an evening will make her sodding tail fall off so what's he going to miss about the actual problem he was being consulted with in the first place?

What we have here is the underlying problem of the NHS. It was set up with the noblest of motives; free at the point of use so all citizens would be able to have their serious medical needs attended to and we would be free of the spectre of people dying for want of seeing a doctor. But since its founding its grown to way, way more than that simple basic service, and we're all partly guilty of making it suck. Over the generations we've demanded more, more, more from the NHS. We want every sniffle and cold treated, every illness given immediate and the best treatment, the treatment of ridiculous conditions (you can get a sex change on the NHS for fuck's sake) and the system simply can't cope. Accordingly the government step in to lecture, harangue and bully us into whatever bullshit they can come up with to try and keep us "healthy" and out of the doctor's surgery. We allowed the NHS to change from a backstop into a state monolith that seeks to control our "healthy choices" because they feel they have to just to stop the whole edifice collapsing in a mountain of debt and unpaid bills.

I'm quite aware that the Cuban Habaneros and that bottle of Malbec aren't good for me thanks. It's my choice and when I want your health advice I will ask for it. Oh, and I have BUPA so, state, kindly sod off.

Hard Cases Make Bad Laws

2012-01-05T08:22:00.000Z

Yesterday as you all read Steven Lawrence finally achieved some measure of justice with the conviction for murder of two of his killers. From what I have seen of the evidence and the trial it seems that the beyond reasonable doubt the right people have been jailed for this crime and two violent, racist thugs have been put behind bars where they belong.

But I'm not entirely happy.

In order to put these two on trial an ancient principle of natural justice was torn up by the former Home Secretary David Blunkett, that of double jeopardy, the principle that you cannot be tried twice for the same offense. This is a right that has been part of English common law for centuries and it even enshrined in article 50 of the European Convention on Human Rights (although conveniently a part of the convention our craven politicians didn't sign us up to whilst signing us up to all the other bullshit parts).

Double jeopardy defences are fundamentally important in protecting the individual against the machinery of the state; they stop the state bringing prosecution after prosecution until they get the "right" result - kind of like those EU referendums. Their removal by the previous Labour government weakens the individual and was wrong and its generally accepted that it was done primarily with the Lawrence case in mind.

Yes in the Lawrence case the police and CPS made a series of huge cock ups and maybe even were willfully negligent leading to the acquittal of the defendants. Many things went wrong and under double jeopardy they would have literally got away with murder; but hard cases make bad laws and unpalatable though it may be to have the likes of Norris wandering around as a free man* I would rather that than yet another erosion of the fundamental rights of the citizen by a politician trying to look "tough" and trying to patch up the cock ups of the police and Crown Prosecution Service.

* although I believe he was already in the nick on another offence

The problem with PR is always the other guys

2012-01-04T13:13:00.001Z

I was in The Netherlands over the new year and one evening went out for dinner with friends. Our walking route to the restaurant took us past a small concentration of what the Americans quaintly term "Adult Bookstores" (although books are about the one item you're guaranteed not to find in them). Now you can't walk past without having a quick look in the window can you and I noticed something seemed to be missing.

"Hey," I asked my Dutch mates, "Where's the horseporn gone?" for indeed there appeared to be a dearth of magazines depicting, as Bill Bryson once put it, "A horse receiving a certain oral service a horse would not normally expect to receive, not even from another horse.

"Oh it's been banned. It's illegal to sell it or even possess it now."

I was rather shocked. Not because I have any fondness for horseporn beyond its comedy and shock value, it's about as erotic as a wet weekend in Whitley Bay, but it, along with similar "on the edge" forms of porn, are to my mind a good bell-weather of how free a society is; a measure of a state saying "You know what, this is not hurting anyone so its absolutely none of our business." and it saddened me to see a country I'd rather admired for its socially liberal values take a lurch towards the kind of blue nosed "we know best" shite we have to put up with here.

Not only that, but my friend told me that they have made any representation of bestiality illegal, so I suppose the Rijksmuseum will have to had taken this down.

Now the reason for this is down to a small political party, the PvdD (Partij voor de Dieren, "Party for Animals") who, thanks to proportional representation, gained a couple of seats and this rather ridiculous law was their price for playing ball in the coalition that was formed (and subsequently collapsed as it happens).

Now you might think that not being able to legally buy the collected DVD box set of Bodil Joensen's barnyard movies is no big deal in the grand scheme of things* but just for a moment swap "Party for Animals" with "Party for Sharia in the UK" who, with PR, win three or four seats in a hung parliament.

What would their blood price be?

Now PR has been kicked into the long grass here thanks to Nick's university fee U-turn and some clever play by the tories but it'll come around again and you'll be asked again to vote on its introduction. Before voting ask yourself whereas you might be happy with your little party getting some power all those other little parties will as well and you might just find the pork gets banned along with the piggy pr0n.

* especially as Teh Interwebs has more or less made all forms of censorship moot.

Clucking Hell

2011-12-31T14:22:00.000Z

Rejoice chickens! From midnight tonight all throughout the EU you shall be free as the European Union has banned battery hen cages. Well. Kinda.

Now I am all for an end to all intensive farming and battery hen egg production in particular. I keep chickens and they are all ex-battery hens that I get from the folks at the British Hen Welfare Trust. When you get your hens they look bloody awful, weak legs, most of their feathers missing and looking like the inhabitants of some avian Bergen-Belsen. The good news is that with a bit of feeding, running around and time they get back most of their feathers and soon start pecking, scratching, having dust baths and generally doing that chickeny thing. Oh and the eggs taste better than anything you'll get in the supermarkets too so they well pay you back for your £5 a bird donation.

Soeven though I'll probably have to source my chucks from elsewhere in the future I'll be a happy dragon if I know there aren't going to be any more fucked up featherless chickens, so (grits teeth) well done EU.

Ah, no, actually strike that... not so well done after all:

[Jane Howarth, from the British Hen Welfare Trust] said: "The British egg industry has really stepped up to the mark and they are ready. But at the moment we're looking at a situation where there could be 80 million hens still in illegal cages in Europe."

...

Agriculture Minister Jim Paice said: "It is unacceptable that after the ban on battery cages comes into effect, millions of hens across Europe will still remain in poor conditions.
"We have all had plenty of time to make these changes, but 13 EU nations have not done so. The UK egg industry alone has spent £400million ensuring hens live in better conditions.

So as ever the UK has rolled over to the mighty EU and done everything our master in Brussels have told us to do but 13 countries out of 27, nearly half the EU, have just gone "fuck you" and carried on just as they bloody well please.

And do you know what the EU will do about that? Sweet fuck all, that's what.

And do you know what the EU will do if we have the temerity to ban egg imports from those 13 countries? Fine the shit out of us for daring to break trading rules no doubt.

As millions will be saying at new years eve parties throughout the land tonight "Do you think we can just leave yet?"

"Cluck, motherfucker"

... and by the rulers as useful.

2011-12-19T08:12:00.000Z

You would have thought that politicians in the country would know to steer well clear of religion by now wouldn't you; I might not have liked the last incumbents of No. 10 but they were at least wise enough to "not do God". But nope, here comes Dishface at the weekend banging on about Christianity and "[calling] for a revival of traditional Christian values to counter Britain's "moral collapse"."

I cannot helped be reminded of the words of Seneca:

“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.”

as yet again one of our leaders who by his own admission is ""full of doubts" about big theological issues" (read "Of course I don't believe in this twaddle") tells all the little people what's good for them; in this case they have to believe in the big fairy in the sky who, if you riot and steal TV's from Comet, will put you on the naughty step when you die. I mean it truly is pathetic isn't it that he could even attempt such a pitch. And what's equally annoying is that maybe he really does think you can't be "good without god" - failing to realize that what we call "good", compassion, altruism and so on, come about because we are social animals and we get this kind of thing from our evolution. Sure we are still savage little monkeys not very well equipped to live in together in the huge numbers we do since Civilization* kicked off 6000 odd years ago so we need policemen and jails but even in the most religious countries you'll find those institutions.

But with that said he is right in that we do for better or worse, and even as an atheist I am prepared to say generally "better', have a rich heritage of Christian tradition in this country. It has given us art, music, architecture, jurisprudence and the poetry of the King James Bible. I would hate to see this country turn into a place where I have to start wishing people the anodyne "Happy Holidays" rather than a hearty "Merry Christmas". We do "do God" here, but Britons tend in the main to regard overt displays of religiosity rather suspiciously. As an example there American Football player who is famous for doing a full kneel down hands together prayer whenever he scores a touchdown; a display like that from a rugby or football player here would be quite rightly regarded as crass. That's why all Cameron pontificating about "what the proles need is a good dose of the Fear of the Almighty, fire and brimstone style" is going to cost him, despite how well it plays to the blue rinse brigades in his ranks.

* i.e. "Living in cities"

Canada spots naked emperor

2011-12-13T08:21:00.002Z

I read today that Canada has gone "Hey, that guy's not wearing any clothes!" and withdrawn from the Kyoto Treaty

Good for them. Now Dishface, how about we do the same? Kyoto was always a complete crock of shit in my opinion. I mean what use is a treaty that the biggest CO₂ emitters (China and the USA) don't agree to and that actively hampers actually finding a solution. All Kyoto was was a bunch of eco nutters and white liberals wringing their hands about mummy planet and feeling guilty that we had shit and poor people in Shitholestan didn't and the General Mwombawomba's of places like Shitholestan holding out their hands asking for more money to ~~develop low carbon economies~~ buy more gold bathrooms and Lear Jets.

Now regulars will know I'm not a "climate change denier" but I can see that fucking up your economy and lifestyle by impossible to obtain carbon reduction targets isn't going to work. Our climate has always changed, that's what it does with or without our input and it's no use at all trying to keep it the same like some museum exhibit. We need to do what we've always done in the face of changing climate and that is adapt and mitigate. We are at a stage in human evolution where we don't just have to migrate in the face of changing crop growth and sea levels, we can do things about it. By all means cut waste and pollution as much as you can but we need to harness the power of industry, science and technology to give us solutions. Better flood defenses, crops that can tolerate drier (or wetter) conditions better, more advanced power generation systems, tank-grown meat made from stem cells, tiny pet unicorns that can live for a week on a lettuce leaf*.

Sure the planet gets a little warmer (or is it cooler, I keep getting mixed messages) and maybe the cutesy polar bears might have to be fitted with water wings and some species may even die off but they will be replaced by other species. That's what happens in a biosphere, they are not static, they adapt and change.

Taking billions out of a first world economy and shoving it to some third world bottomless money pit will not and could not save a single bloody life, human or animal.

And as I see that the Durban conference (bet all the delegates flew there rather than paddled down in canoes made from recycled tofu) seems to be realizing this and has kicked the can down the road a few years much to the howling and gnashing of teeth of the usual suspects. Maybe the message is getting through that we need an new approach.

Not holding my breath, mind you.

* top of my list, that one.

How Long is a Piece of String?

2011-12-12T07:55:00.001Z

I was chatting to some of my Dutch and German friends on IRC last night (well it was that or watch that bloody singing competition) and the subject of the Euro came up. "You're in finance Dragon," someone said, "How long do you think the Euro will last"

Well just to be clear I may work for a financial organization (thanks for all that taxpayer's money guys!) but I'm not a trader, I just work with the shouty braces types and the bespectacled chaps with Aspergers and maths PhD's* to come up with clever trading and risk management applications. I'm quite good at it too, my systems have won industry awards.

What I'm not good at is divination. To be honest I have no idea if the Euro will survive or if not how long it will live and what will be the manner of its demise. But I'm not alone, nobody does. My own belief is that the markets (well equity** markets at least) will just in the end get fed up with looking at bond rates and endless politicos preening themselves at crisis conference after crisis conference and Nick Clegg throwing his rattle out of the pram and having a tantrum and will go back to doing what they do, looking at company fundamentals, share price relative to earnings, that kind of thing.

Personally I hope the Euro goes and the EU with it. I am no wrap myself in the Union Flag and parade with a bulldog little Englander, far from it, I am very pro-European. I've worked all around Europe, speak four European languages (two of them well enough to do business in) and am all for co-operation that brings us peace and mutual prosperity. However the EU has become none of these things and is seems obvious to me that it is becoming more and more of a tyranny of oligarchs and apparatchiks, unelected, remote and hostile to the liberal ethics which made Europe's nations great in the first place. It needs to go.

And my Dutch and German friends agreed. And they said they would still be able to sell me Stollen and Grolsch perfectly well without the EU and could I bring some PG Tips and Tiptree's marmalade when I come over at New Year.

* Come on, when did you ever meet a quant who was in any way or shape normal!
** Shares to you and me

For now we see through a glass, darkly

2011-12-05T08:59:00.001Z

Last night's Channel 4 drama "Black Mirror - The National Anthem", written by Charlie Brooker, was quite superb; by turns hilarious, suspenseful, horrifying and illuminating. It certainly lived up to its title, holding up a dark reflection of ourselves in the age of 24 hour rolling news, social networks and the hive mind.

I don't want to spoil the plot too much if you haven't seen it (you can get it from 4OD) but the story revolves around a Kate Middleton figure who has been kidnapped; the kidnappers don't want money, their demand is that the Prime Minister has sex with a pig, live on TV.

What we see is a government, and it could be any government, utterly at a loss at how to cope with the new world that's been created under their feet, unable to control their citizenry empowered as they are with the new tools of the social network age. "Why haven't you taken it down" says the PM when informed the ransom demand video is on YouTube. "We have," says a Whitehall mandarin "but every time we take one down ten more spring up in its place". This is a world where government can issue as many D-Notices and super injunctions and subtle (and not so subtle) leaning on journalists and it makes no difference. In the past the saying was that a lie could be half way round the world before the truth got its boots on , in the Twitter age an embarrassing truth can be three times round the world and have nipped down to the pub for a pint before the government censorship machine has even woken up.

In the drama even when the story leaks with Fox News and Al Jazeera (who,lets face it, wouldn't give a shit about a UK Government D notice at the best of times) broadcasting first the networks are coy, referring to "an indecent act'. "What indecent act" says a drayman to a barmaid as he makes a deliver "'e's got to do it wif' a pig" says the landlady's kid, hardly looking up from his BlackBerry. Now not only is it impossible to hide the story it's impossible to edit out the gory details.

I believe Charlie Brooker's main point he was trying to make is make us ask "well if this did happen, would you watch it, would you really watch, on live TV, a man utterly humiliating himself in a depraved spectacle... of course you would you sick fucks, we all would, we're human, this is what we do" and we see deserted streets as the minutes tick down to the deadline, crowds gathering round TV's giving lecherous cheers and "go on my son" encouragement which morphs into a sort of horrified cross between revulsion and fascination; a worldwide "Two Girls One Cup" reaction video*

But for my money what is more interesting is the what this drama says about the power we, the common man, the sixty million to their six hundred, now carry around in our pockets. We have seen this year that this shit can bring down governments in the so-called Arab Spring. Our lords and masters must be truly afraid.

* for the love of Fafnir if you are at work and you don't understand the reference DO NOT Google that!

Shush, don't tell the government

2011-11-25T07:36:00.001Z

For various reasons I found myself in the market for a 3G broadband dongle last week to replace the ancient Vodafone PCMCIA card version I have been using for years* and a look at the coverage maps showed my best bet was Three and a pay as you go would work out fine instead of a contract.

So off I flapped down to the Three shop and just out of curiosity I wondered if in out surveillance society you could still buy communications equipment anonymously. And it turns out that, yes, you can. Picked up a dongle pre-loaded with a 1Gb allowance for 20 or so quid cash, no names, no registration, nothing. You can buy top-up allowances at a tenner a time again for cash in plenty of places so I have an anonymous internet connection, and it's pretty fast too.

This got me thinking what would you have to do to be virtually undetectable using this, and its not that hard. There are location services, you might have seen these advertised as "find where your kids are" services that use data from mobile phone masts and triangulation to identify the location of a mobile device and the networks will of course give this information to the police but a bit of research indicates that they are not that accurate. Plod would have you believe that they could go "Yep, Dragon's on his 3G searching for ocelot porn again, he's at his house behind the water pipes, in the back bedroom" but they can't. Even in a city with a dense collection of masts it's only accurate to 100 meters at best, in rural areas that drops to kilometers.

Traffic analysis would be a way to work out its you of course. If anyone really was interested in finding me they would be able to work out the dongle gets used most mornings on a particular train into London just by watching what masts it connects to so you would probably need to use it in one space or adapt a usage pattern that makes no sense and can't be attributed to you. Dumping the dongle every 3 or 4 months as well and getting a new one, ideally on a different network, would probably be prudent as well.

Combine this with strong encryption and the use of proxies like TOR and darknets and you're as undetectable as an undetectable thing.

I'm amazed we can still get away with this, really amazed. I would have thought that our lords and masters would have pointed at those modern horsemen of the apocalypse, Terrorist and Peedofils, and gone "waaaah! all communication equipment must be registered for your own protection citizens".

Of course all the information presented above is just a thought experiment, if you choose to act on any of this I take no responsibility. But here's a link so you can find your nearest Three store...

* "Tiamat" - my lovely old T60 is laid up awaiting repairs and the Compaq 6720 (named Voliatus as it's not the smartest lappy in the world) I've borrowed doesn't like the old card it seems.

Dragon's Magic Pianos - The Korg 707 - an occasional series

2011-11-18T13:31:00.001Z

I know a lot of my visitors come here from Old Holborn's Blog and expect a bit of right of centre libertarian politics (or just a dragon stomping around and swearing at stuff) but just for a change here's a little piece on what might become an occasional series on old synthesizers which, since Mrs Dracunculus bought me a Yamaha DX7 for my birthday last year I have become an occasional collector of.

The first one I'd like to tell you about is a real little gem of a keyboard, the Korg 707. Made in the late 80's it was very much aimed at the budget synth market with a 49 key keyboard and a rather cheapy looking plastic case. Its an FM synth with 4 operators and 8 voice polyphony and like all FM and digital synths of that era its a git to program (although lots easier than the DX7) although Korg, with an eye to live performance, put three sliders on the front so you can tweak the two envelope generators and the "Timbre" (basically the resonance Q) in real time. Play this little puppy and you start to use these controls a lot and very nice they are too. If you really want to go for that 80's synthpop band look you can run it on batteries and it comes with studs on the side so you can sling a guitar strap on it and wear it over you shoulder for that "I am an utter cockwallet" look.

This is my beast, its a bit tatty and the bottom C doesn't sound but as I picked it up for 35 quid on eBay I really can't complain.

Like any FM synth its very good at metallic and bell tones and I have to say although most of the presets suck donkey balls there are some real gems in there, especially the "Tine Piano" which you can hear in this little bit of music I composed.

November 707 - Dracunculus

All that is recorded directly from the 707 on the presets (no sequencing) and fiddling with the performance sliders (and a bit of reverb and compression in Reason) - yeah I know I'm about a good a musician as I am a blogger.

One of the nicest things about it is that the keyboard has full size velocity sensitive keys and, amazingly for something in this price range, full aftertouch, so it works surprisingly well as a MIDI controller and given that these go for 50 to 70 quid on eBay if you're in the market for a 4-octave controller you could do a lot worse than get one of these.

I like mine so much I'm thinking of getting a tidier one.

Happy birthday to Grumpy Dragon

2011-11-15T07:45:00.001Z

Happy birthday to my blog, which turned 5 yesterday, which means it should be forming sentences of a few simple words and can ask to go to the toilet.

According to Google the stats are 13205 pageviews - 479 posts and 1,247,419 gratuitous uses of the word "fuck".

Thanks for reading my drivel over all these years and here's to another 5 years. It may have learned to spell and use punctuation correctly by then.

My liver, not yours.

2011-11-14T17:49:00.001Z

Here we go again. Having demonised the smokers out of existence The Righteous are, as we have come to expect, training their guns on anything else that, heaven forfend, might give us some kind of pleasure and of course the next demon to be slain is the drink.

Latest on the block are pseudo-charity the British Liver Trust. Pseudo charity? Well when did you last see these people rattling a tin on the street or were accosted by a cheery Aussie chugger demanding you sign over your children yea unto the seventh generation to them? You didn't because they are funded largely by the Government, this from their most recent filing at the Charities Commission:

Key fundraising successes of the year include a three year grant amounting to a total of £489,506 from the Big Lottery Fund’s Reaching Communities Programme to expand our support group network ...

OK so not funded out of taxes but its a reasonable supposition that they're not going to be wanting to piss off Whitehall any time soon or no Lottery cash for you Mr Hepatitis.

But look, you could say, they are having a go at the government, it's all over the BBC...

Government-led policies on alcohol throughout the UK have been branded a joke by the chief executive of the charity the British Liver Trust.

"We need to see direct action to prevent the daily death rate from liver cancer increasing," said Mr Langford. "At the moment all we are seeing are weak policies or no action at all. However, there are so many solutions to the problem."

And rather conveniently, up pops a government spokesman to say...

"We will shortly be setting out how we will tackle all the health and social impacts of alcohol in our alcohol strategy," he said.

Well wasn't that convenient?

And you know, you just know, that "our alcohol strategy' will be "tax the fuck out of the dragon because he's got the money and he likes glass or two of wine when he gets home". But all for my own good of course, see the Liver Trust says we have to do these things to help you; you're only a dragon, you can't possibly be trusted to make your own descisions about your health. Trust us, we are The Worthy, we are The Righteous.

Well you can all go and fuck yourself with the biggest dildo Bad Dragon make* Look it's not as if I don't know what alcohol does, you tell me often enough. Do I drink more than your reccomended 21 units a week? You bet on Fafnir's scaly tail I do, but that's my call, not yours. I will take that risk.

And it's not that much of a risk when you look at it...

In 2010, an estimated 3,788 people died from liver cancer across the UK, equating to an average of 10 people each day

... to put that into perspective that's 0.006% of the population.

"But the problem is growing!' screams Dr Liver...

Mr Langford said the condition seemed to be the poor relation to the other big killers, but was the only health problem out of the big five - cardiovascular, respiratory, circulatory and general cancers are the other four - showing an increasing trend.

Well how about the reason for that is that people are surviving some cancers and dying from others, that and we are all living longer so we're more likely to get rarer cancers, plus the rise, since 1977 which is their baseline in the report, of HIV/AIDS and associated conditions such as Hepatitis? You can't just point at the booze and say "that's your cause, right there, outlaw that and you'll see liver cancer rates drop" - that's just bad science.

Look I'm sure the British Liver Foundation do good work supporting people with liver disease and the like but will you please stop using dodgy statistics and cozying up to government giving the po faced arseholes an excuse to demonise and tax the fuck out of one of the few affordable pleasures we have left.

Or I could come round to your place, douse you in a fine XO Armagnac and sneeze in your direction; up to you.

* it's the Sea Dragon in aquamarine with the integral spooge-tube in case you're interested

"Remember what happened to Anjem Choudary" they whisper

2011-11-08T07:39:00.004Z

I see over at Max Farquar's blog everyone's favourite uppity mussie Anjem Choudary has been frothing at the mouth again, this time inciting his fellow rugbutters to kick off at armistice day parades and bad-mouthing the military as muslim baby killers, etc, etc.

Well quite frankly that's his right and good luck to him. In a working democracy all the voices of the demos should be heard, even if, particularly if perhaps, what they have to say is unpopular.

Where of course the likes of Chowdray and his ilk cross the line is of course they don't just talk and seek to persuade. There is always the implicit, and more often explicit, threat of violence pointed at anyone who "upsets muslim sensibilities"*... "Remember Theo van Gogh" they whisper, "Look what happened to Charlie Hebdo's offices" they write.

Well Anjem and your pals, maybe you should remember that with your right to free speech comes your responsibility to bear the consequences of that speech and I would point out that you are upsetting an awful lot of people and in particular a lot of people who are trained at great expense to fuck you up in 197 ways before you even realize its happened. Of course I am not advocating violence against you, that would be stooping to your level, I am merely making an observation. But maybe you and your ilk had better take a good hard look at yourself and have a serious think about what you're before you flap your gob in public again, because if you carry on as you are I fear that what will be being whispered in your "community" is "Remember what happened to Anjem Choudary"

* pointing out that their prophet was a pedophile is always a good way to do this.

Strangled at birth

2011-11-02T08:05:00.000Z

Rather unwittingly the last spendthrift Labour government thew the middle classes a nice little bone in their bid to be all green and cuddly. This was something called the Feed In Tarrif (FIT) which basically meant that if you generated your own electricity from a solar photovoltaic array on your roof you would get paid to do so and at a very generous rate of 43p per kWh as well. That's guaranteed for 25 years and index linked.

Oh and as there's no way to actually measure how much you generate gets back into the grid, you get 3p per 0.5kWh on top of that.

And you get to use all the electricity you generate too, so a household bill like mine of around £800 a year would come down to around £200 a year.

So with a 4kW array costing around £14k to install it works out that over the 25 years you'll make around 10 to 12% return and break even around the 8 year mark. And with my current investments making 2 or 3% at best its an absolute no-brainer. So last month some men crawled over my roof and I now have my own little power station that's generated over 100kWh of nice clean energy and enriched me to the best part of fifty quid in the couple of weeks its been running.

What's that Mr Government? Middle class people with disposable income making a profit? Oh no, that will never do, never never never! You're there Mr Middleclass to pay your taxes that we will spend on services you'll never use and give your money away to those poor developing nations with space programmes and nuclear weapons like India and China. We can't have you doing that, you're supposed to be installing solar because you can afford it and to make us in government look all green and answer the problem of Warble Gloaming! You're not actually supposed to treat this as an investment!

So in six weeks time the coalition are going to cut the FIT to 22p, and that's only if you've got a "C" energy rated house already (which is nigh on impossible to get if your house is more than 20 years old) . I did a quick back on an Excel spreadsheet calculation and the ROI on a 4kW rig like mine drops to around 2% and the payoff period almost triples to 21 years.

Now a small but significant industry has grown up in this country over the last 2 years to service the demand for Solar PV; it's estimated that it employs around 25,000 people. This is not to mention the ancillary services it supports like the team of scaffolders who shoved a load of metal poles round my house (and then took 2 weeks to come and take them down again!) - I was chatting to Mr Scaffolder and he said solar PV was around half their work these days.

Well Mr Scaffold is probably going to have to lay off some of his staff and there's going to be 25000 people heading for the dole office come December because nobody is going to want Solar PV now. A new industry, supporting thousands of people has been strangled at birth because oh my god we can't have people making money out of Eco-Wibble can we. Those people on the social are going to cost way fecking more than the feed in tarrif money ever would.

Sure, the high rate was to kick start the solar business in the UK and it was unsustainable at 43p but why the hell didn't you cut it back slowly and on the dates you promised? All the hoons in Whitehall have done by cutting the FIT in half is to strangle one of the very private enterprises that was supposed to hoover up all these public sector jobs at birth.

Fucking idiots.

Church of England "Threatens" on porn.. oh noes!

2011-10-31T17:24:00.000Z

I think being "threatened" by the C of E must be like being savaged by a half dead chinchilla; bizarre, not dangerous and you just end up feeling sorry for the chinchilla.

So what are the men who go around wearing frocks getting all hot under the dog-collar about today? Well if that bastion of accurate and unbaised reportage the Daily Fail is to believed "War on web sleaze: Church of England threatening to withdraw millions invested in ISPs over rise of internet porn. OK so you have "invested" these "millions" how exactly? That would be largely through shares sold in the open market I would expect, so you sell your holding and lose all that lovely dividend income, depress the share price which provides a buying opportunity to other investors who purchase these shares and raise the price. Your net contribution to "stemming the tide of these sick and depraved images" is the square root of fuck all.

Look, we have had porn forever, and "extreme" porn at that; there is a cave painting in southern France that is tens of thousands of years old, well before any form of civilisation existed, it depicts a crude stick figure of a human shagging some kind of animal. Porn isn't going to go away despite what you think your sky fairy would want. Rather amusingly and sticking with animals for a moment the much heralded "Extreme Porn" laws introduced last year get a mention along with the fact that hardly anyone has been proscecuted under these laws; well that's for a reason, it's nigh on impossible, with the exception of bestiality, to mount a case as to what is "grossly offensive... and realistic" (and you only get bestiality under the wire because it's pretty obvious its an animal and not a human) so all the cases have been for possession of bestiality images, and even there one case got dropped as the video clip in question was a CGI render (and cartoons don't count - so all you Furry and My Little Pony rule 34 fans are in the clear).

Of course the reason why this has all come to the surface is the recent Vincent Tabak conviction for murder where it transpires he'd been looking at "violent porn". The usual suspects in the Daily Wail and elsewhere start their knee jerk "It was the porn what made him do it" blissfully ignoring the fact that presumably these websites were not solely set up just for Vince and therefore tens if not hundreds of thousands probably paid these left handed mousing sites a visit and then didn't go on to strangle their neighbor. If you're the sort of person who would take someone's life I would posit that you're that kind of person and watching some S&M porn isn't going to make a blind bit of difference if you are going to act on your impulses - in fact I would say and the studies bear out that having a safety valve of knocking one out over some staged smut might just act as a safety valve*

The bishops might want to consider that before they sell their ISP shares and buy cassock futures and tofu bonds.

* incidences of sexual assault have decreased in countries such as Denmark and The Netherlands after the legalisation of porn.

10 Billion Elephants in the Room

2011-10-28T07:31:00.000Z

I had a play on the beeb's "work out your human sequence number" gizmo the other day and apparently I am the 77,191,204,131st person to have existed. All a bit silly really but the truly scary number comes when I saw that since I hatched in Blackpool back in the mid 60's the population of the world has doubled.

Now I am no Malthusian. Thomas Malthus, as you may recall, predicted that population growth would outstrip food supply which to be fair to him and the mathematics of the day did appear to be the case. However population didn't grow in quite the way Malthus' models had predicted and, being clever monkeys, we cam up with new and improved ways of food production. We continue to do that today and there's no reason to think that we can't support the predicted 10 billion peak population; sure the meat you're eating will probably be being grown from stem cells in a tank and your wheat and veg will have been highly genetically modified but at least we'll be spared from Charlton Heston yelling "Soylent Green is made of people" to anyone who'll listen.

No that's not the issue, the issue is one which the warble gloaming alarmists seem to have been rather quiet about, the 10 billion elephants in the room. Even if we cut out carbon emissions all those new people will still be consuming resources that'll need producing and transporting , they'l all be breathing out carbon dioxide and, at the risk of being crude, breaking wind and releasing tons of methane into the atmosphere. Sure we may be able to feed everyone but at what cost?

And I was just, you know, curious as to when the Global Warming lobby was going to start to calling for mandatory sterilization, people culls, and yes maybe the opening of a few centres where Edward G Robinson can commit suicide whilst watching deer frolic to Beethoven's Pastoral symphony.

Just asking.

The Devil is in the details.

2011-10-27T07:07:00.000Z

So our lovely leaders are all patting themselves on the back having "saved" the Euro and if you believe the hyperbole from the German Chancellor, saved Europe from hearing the ring of marching jackboots again.

What they have done of course is merely kick the can a bit further down the road. There's still no way even a trillion Euros can prop up the failing economies of Europe who bought into the idea you could buy prosperity with other people's money.

A couple of details behind the headlines that your average layman would most likely miss, if they could find them at all, point to what a fudge this is and which will, in all likelihood, make the problem worse. Firstly not only do the banks take a 50% hit on any Greek debt they own they are being asked to "Recapitalise" to the tune of 160 billion Euro in the next 8 months. Essentially this means the banks have to hold cash or other highly liquid asset classes on their books and they can't lend it. Get that bit, they can't lend this money. Now cast your mind back to last year and the credit crunch which was caused by, right, banks not being in a position to lend money.

The other little weasel word I spotted is the real person-of-colour in the woodpile, that word is "leverage"...

The firepower of the main euro bailout fund - known as the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) - is to be boosted from the 440bn euros set up earlier this year to 1tn euros. There is about 250bn euros left available in the EFSF, which the summit statement said could be leveraged 4-5 times.

Put simply this means that this much trumpeted 1 trillion Euro is not actually there, what they are going to do is put up the 250 billion they do have (from your and my taxes) and basically borrow 4 or 5 times that amount, that's essentially what leverage means. And of course if you borrow money, you have to pay interest on it.

So they have commited us to, yet more and more borrowing. An endless cycle of debt backed up only by the promise it can be paid back through future tax revenues, that's money out of our pockets.

All Merkel and Sarkosy have done is put us and our children in hock to the Chinese for years and years.

How long will this madness go on because as sure as I have wings and a tail it's gone on too far and too deep for it all to end in sweetness and light and I fear all Merkel and friends have done is make those jackboots even more of a racing certainty.

The Lads from Lagos don't miss a trick

2011-10-27T06:46:00.001Z

Was wondering when I was going to see my first Gaddafi trunk box 419 scam...

Sir,

I got your info from a diary to one of my fathers aide.You understand my father (Muammar Gadaffi) is dead. I would need to secure some of my funds overseas to enable me get a good legal defence in the coming months,as I anticipate I and my brothers shall face.

I have some money safely kept in a vault somewhere in Europe.I ask you to be my TRUSTEE to retrieve this fund.Basically you will take care of ALL the necessary expenses to formalize the papers in your name to secure the fund,as i am presently incapacitated to do so.

Please,if you do not have the capacity to secure such large amount as it,do not bother replying.Be sure You will also take back whatever you have spent afterwards.

If you have our sympathy on this,please contact our attorney in UK immediately.

Name: John Gerspach
Email: gadaffiaffairs@johngerspach.info
City: London
Country: United Kingdom

Thanks,
Saif al-Islam Gaddafi

Feel free to email him and mess him around... safe scambaiting tips and tricks can be found here, tell them that the Grumpy Dragon sent you.

... And I Feel Fine

2011-10-21T07:25:00.000Z

Remember Harold Camping? He was the American preacher who said the world was going to end back in May and convinced a whole bunch of fools to spend every penny they had on advertising the fact and trying to get us heathens to convert.

As the world didn't end he had to come up with an excuse and as I recall it was something along the lines of Gawd had actually ended the world and decided who was going to get to sit on a cloud playing a harp and who was going to be toasting marshmallows and singing camp-fire songs with Beelzebub but the actual demolition squads would roll up later in the year.

Today in fact, the 21st of October. Due to some oversight The Almighty has neglected to inform Harold of what time he's going to kick off on his smiting binge.

I'm actually really looking forward to what his explanation is this time. I'm betting it'll be along the lines of "Actually the world has been destroyed and you are now in hell, which just happens to look exactly like where you were before. Those of you who are residents of Basildon will be perfectly aware of this already".

Whatever his excuse such is the depth of human stupidity is that he will still have followers and there will remain millions of people who really do believe that the world will literally end in their lifetimes....

Professor Farid Esack, head of the religious studies at the University of Johannesburg, likened Rapture believers to "those who stockpiled food on the eve of a new South Africa", but warned against dismissing them as "fanatical loons"

Actually he's right, we should be medicating them as dangerously delusional mental patients. Regrettably I don't think we could physically manufacture the volume of anti-psychotics we'd need

And a new bunch of lefty cunts

2011-10-19T07:09:00.000Z

Ah, a lovely morning, bright, cold and crisp. But what's that disgusting smell? Ah that would be the launch of another left wing hand wringing pseudo-charity, this one going by the name of "The Intergenerational Foundation" bleating on about "fairness" and "equality" by which of course they mean the usual Fabian bullying, fucking around with your life and, of course, taking your money.

This lot are coming for your house. You have worked hard all your life, brought up your children and have got yourself a nice house with three or four bedrooms; maybe like me you have a spare room for when relatives stay over and have converted one former bedroom into an office / study. Ah but now you are a " clinging to your home long after it has outlived its usefulness" citizen. You are hoarding resources that need to be "reallocated". It's all in the interests of "fairness" of course so just pack one small suitcase, that's your cattle truck over there grandad, kommen Sie bitte mit uns. Raus Opa! Raus!.

Of course they are using very soothing words at first; it's all about encouragement...

IF suggested encouraging older people to downsize by exempting over-60s from stamp duty when they sold to move to a smaller home

... but pretty much in the same breath as they wave a small carrot they go on to wield a fucking big stick...

The campaign group also urged the government to consider replacing council tax with "a proper land tax, to reflect the social cost of occupying housing, particularly housing that is larger than one's needs".

And it seems that founder Angus Hanton has previous, here's an interview he did with ~~Pravda~~ The BBC recently...

“Let’s take my own house [which] I bought 16 years ago for £160,000. It’s in south-east London. It’s now worth about £1.15m.”
“So I’ve gained a million pound windfall to which I do not feel entitled, and that windfall, at the moment, is tax-free. Were I to sell [the house], there’s no tax on that gain.”
“It may appear very lucky for me, but the reality is when I sell, it will probably be to a younger person who’ll be getting a mortgage and spending most of their working life paying off that windfall which went to me. I don’t think that’s fair.

Well if you don't feel entitled to it then maybe I suggest you sell up and donate the money to a soup kitchen or whatever charity assuages your disgusting middle class white male guilt. Don't for one fucking second presume to tell me what I can and can't do with my money you odious collectivist shit.

And just in case you think this bunch of twats are pissing in the wind ask yourself why this is the second story on the BBC's website this morning, the lead article on the Today programme and why the inaugural speakers at their launch are shadow minister Tessa Jowell, and Labour life peer Baroness Bryony Worthington?

Bastards the lot of them.

Having some fun with the recruitment consultants

2011-10-13T07:32:00.000Z

Recruitment consultants are one of those necessary evils in my line of work. Sure there are some good ones out there but there's a lot of them that seem to think that the way to do their job is essentially by using the same method as a Nigerian 419 scammer. You have a list of email addresses and you simply fire whatever role you happen to have at everyone on that list regardless of suitability, location or anything else for that matter.

I have one company that does this about three or four times a day. However one of them has got smart and titled his email as "This is a personal email..." rather than "Here's a Java gig you're going to ignore"...

Dear Grumpy Dragon,

Thank you for registering with us even if it was a while ago. I am the .Net specialist (not technically like you) within the Thames Valley area solely working on permanent placements. I expect to be speaking to you all in the near future.

I currently have a number of exciting opportunities in Guildford, Reading and their surrounding areas. If you haven’t already sent this message to your junk folder then I would love the opportunity to find out your current situation and interest.

If you could drop me a quick email stating whether you’re looking (or not) and location then I can make sure that I focus my attention to relevant opportunities that would be good for you.

"Exciting" and "Guildford" don't go together in my book.

Hello Recruitment Consultant

Thanks for your mail.

Yes I did register on your site some time ago and with what must have been quite an old CV as I keep getting offers of 25k coding jobs in Portsmouth from a variety of agents at your company.

Quite frankly I wouldn't get out of bed for 25k, and certainly not if I had to work in Portsmouth.

And to be honest a similar gig in Slough or Reading isn't exactly going to be getting me champing at the bit either. I mean have you actually been to Slough? It's like having the will to live sucked out of you with a striped bendy straw.

All in all I think it would be best if you could either remove my profile from your database or point me in the direction of a link on your website where I can do this myself. Whereas it's been amusing to hear the likes of Ceris and Melanie trying to big up a 30k J2SE job in Southampton every week, the novelty factor is starting to wear off and I find myself increasingly tempted to hit the "junk' button.

I know you'd like me to send in a current CV but I'm not going to as I know you and your colleagues would simply then start firing equally irrelevant 50k C++ development team leader in Guildford jobs at me with all the enthusiasm and accuracy of an artillery crew at their first day on the job.

Thanks

Grumpy

I'm fully expecting a phone call from him this morning. They are like The Terminator these people, completely unstoppable.

Thinking of the chiiiildren, again.

2011-10-11T07:31:00.002Z

Ah yes, the Tories. Just like Labour always ready with their ban-hammer when it comes to the thought that someone out there is having a good time. Following on from a report from that bastion of all things blue rinse and prudery the Mother's Union (whose leader appears to be a bloke called "Reg" for some unfathomable reason) your lovely nanny state will insist that the main broadband providers will offer a block on "adult content" to all subscribers.

Of course there's no detail on this but I would imagine it'll be some sort of BT Cleanfeed and so easily subvertable by any moderately tech savvy twelve year old (and they all are) who can configure a proxy. In other words this is a fig leaf, a sop to those members of the party faithful bluenoses who wander around with a disapproving expression and looking for all the world like someone has just rammed a pine cone up their arse.

And how is this going to work in terms of opt in or opt out? The Daily Fail is saying "opt in" whereas everyone else reporting the story is non-commital on that point. Mind you opt in is going to make for some amusing conversations in PC World.

"Do you want porn with your new Dell laptop?"
"Er, yes please."
(Turns on tannoy) "Mr Verity to the checkout please. Can you bring a porn opt-in form. Gentleman wants internet filth on his PC. Now sir, what sort of porn do you want? Straight, gay, midgets, horses, horses with midgets..."

And who, exactly, is going to administer this list of what is "adult material"? Sure so it's a fair bet that a website with a name like "HotSexyDragonsDoingItWithAnythingThatMoves.com" will end up on the list¹ but how about some gay advocacy sites that offer advice to to teenagers struggling with their sexuality? What about stuff that's not actually sexual or illegal in any way but maybe you really would not want your kids looking at such as these "pro anorexia" sites? What about "dangerous" political sites that you find distasteful such as those from extreme right and left wing parties or Muslim extremists?

See where as it's nice an easy to block something obvious that we can pretty much all agree on a definition of such as child porn² it starts to end up like a quagmire of The Dead Marshes proportions as soon as you try to categorise what's "adult" and what isn't.

And as ever, with politicians in charge, they are bound to monumentally fuck this up.

¹ memo to self: register that domain name ASAP.
² and even there, if the spam I get in my mailbox inviting me to come to sites with names like "hot-teens.grubbysmut.org" is to be believed, where I am sure the models are of legal age but are pretending not to be so, where do we stand with the ban-hammer on this one?

What do we want? Unicorn sex slaves! When do we want them? Now!

2011-10-05T07:01:00.000Z

You might have noticed that over in the US of A a bunch of the usual eco-weenies, lefty dreamers and, well anyone who wants to "stick it to The Man" has taken a leaf from our home grown crusties this side of the pond and have "organised" (for a given value of "organise") "Occupy Wall Street" to, well, just have a grumble about the "eeeeevil nasty bankers" and get the opportunity for a ruck with New York's finest as far as I could work out.

But as it happens they have a set of demands, or rather a proposed list of demands that will no doubt be decided on after a good circle drumming session and a couple of herbal jazz cigarettes.Go and have a laugh at the utter naivete on display over here.

A couple of my favourites

Demand two: Institute a universal single payer healthcare system. To do this all private insurers must be banned from the healthcare market as their only effect on the health of patients is to take money away from doctors, nurses and hospitals preventing them from doing their jobs and hand that money to wall st. investors.

I think you'll find that those insurers actually, you know, use the premiums and shit to kinda build hospitals, buy medical equipment and pay the salaries of those doctors and nurses.

Demand one: Restoration of the living wage. This demand can only be met by ending "Freetrade" by re-imposing trade tariffs on all imported goods entering the American market to level the playing field for domestic family farming and domestic manufacturing as most nations that are dumping cheap products onto the American market have radical wage and environmental regulation advantages. Another policy that must be instituted is raise the minimum wage to twenty dollars an hr.

Yea, and with a minimum wage at twenty bucks an hour causing production costs to spiral and hobson's choice about where you get your goods from as you don't have any imports your average citizen is going to be able to afford anything how, exactly?

And anyway, who is going to bother working because:

Demand three: Guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment.

everyone's going to be sat on their arse and getting $20 to do so.

But the best one has got to be this:

Demand eleven: Immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all. Debt forgiveness of sovereign debt, commercial loans, home mortgages, home equity loans, credit card debt, student loans and personal loans now! All debt must be stricken from the "Books." World Bank Loans to all Nations, Bank to Bank Debt and all Bonds and Margin Call Debt in the stock market including all Derivatives or Credit Default Swaps, all 65 trillion dollars of them must also be stricken from the "Books." And I don't mean debt that is in default, I mean all debt on the entire planet period.

Awesome. Truly awesome. This stands as a shining pillar of "What the fuck?" in an already sparkling sea of cuntwittery.

I am going to demand a unicorn sex slave¹. I want it here, and I want it now.

¹ Not fussy about gender, I'm an enlightened 21st century dragon.

Vade retro, Satana

2011-10-03T17:03:00.000Z

Now I don't watch the X Factor, come to think of it I doubt the buttons "1", "0" and "3" have ever been pressed in that sequence on the Sky remote so until this morning I had never heard of someone called Jade Richards.

Anyway I stumbled on a little story in the freebie paper The Metro about Miss Richards who has apparently been thrown off this talent show, not because she can't sing or anything but apparently because she's a Satanist.

Apparently wearing black lacy clothes and posting stuff like "I'm so goth I fuck bats" on your Faceache page makes you a Satanist these days.

I will put good money on her never having heard of Anton Szandor LaVey, showman and inventor of the actual Church of Satan (and even that's not really what you could call Satanism, more a sort of night out for your more extreme libertarians). No this is just another nauseating adolescent who had dabbled in a spot of occult lite and is trying to be "edgy"

If she ever met any real theistic Satanists (as I have back in my misspent youth) she would not be fucking bats she'd be squeaking like one; those guys are proper full on scary.

However she's missing a trick here. You've been discriminated against because of your religion love, start kicking off about "respect my beliefs" and shit and haul the producers of the show up before some human rights tribunal. I'm sure that bunch who pay the legal bills of uppity Christians who won't stop wearing crosses or won't marry gays will be happy to fund a religious person like you.

So you actually don't want to solve the problem.

2011-10-03T07:12:00.000Z

So climate change, what we used to call global warming, or was it cooling (I recall in the 70's we were all going to freeze to death "Day After Tomorrow" style), lets call it climate wobblyness just for fun.

Look I'm not a "denyer", you shove a load of CO₂ into the atmosphere and it will have an effect - and you can trust me on that because I have a BSc Hons in Earth Sciences^* - as to exactly what that effect is we're rather unsure but one thing is for certain the science is not "settled", as the whole sodding point of science is that it's never settled, and I certainly don't buy into the catastrophic alarmist crap which would mean that I'd have to be equipping the ponies with flotation devices in a couple of years. We also know that most of the alarmist pundits don't believe it either as otherwise Al Gore wouldn't have bought himself a beachfront property would he.

But anyway, lets for now accept there's a problem, so wouldn't you like to come up with a fix for this? Well it turns out someone has done here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15132989 basically by making little volcanic clouds. Not sure how you'd scale this up to planet size but one step at a time.

Only we're not making that step. Why?

"We are certainly not ready to carry out experiments, and this project should not just be delayed, but should be cancelled immediately," [Eco weenie who wears batik dresses and has probably named her kid Galadriel Moonbeam, Helena Paul] told BBC News.

"This is particularly important because while the scientists involved keep saying that reducing emissions is the primary necessity, they risk distracting attention from that necessity at a crucial moment."

Because there's only one solution isn't there. That's the one that involves us giving up on the material benefits of progress, turning our societies into some agrarian collectivist monstrosity the very idea of which gets Helena moist and chasing after a small green dragon because he drives a 4x4 and lit up his patio heater this weekend.

You don't want a solution because actually solving global warming doesn't fit your agenda.

^* OK so I specialised in what mud does and how water flows through rocks but I'm a damned sight more qualified that 99% of the people spouting off of the subject.as I have at least done some climate modelling.

Love and Marriage

2011-09-27T16:52:00.000Z

Right back in the blogging saddle after my 3 weeks off wandering around Europe and at one point getting married.

Yes I have done the deed and after 18 years of being the unofficial Mrs Dragon, Mrs Dragon is now the official Mrs Dragon and we have a green piece of paper shoved in the back of a drawer to prove it.

But dear sweet banjo picking Jesus what a bloody fuss. Look if it were down to me this would have been done weeks ago when we both had to go and fill in the official forms with the registrar in the civil version of "Reading the Banns" which I blogged about here. After all they have all the information they need, we spoke individually and together to a registrar, surely that would be enough? All they would need to do is put the notices up and if nobody objects in three weeks you get your chitty, kind of like a planning application.

No chance. You have to hire the venue (fifty quid if you get the early bird version and turn up for the 10am slot) and have some council numpty read a bunch of words and before that another council numpty fills in your form using EXACTLY the same information that she had in front of her but we actually have to tell her the information all over again. I mean talk about feather-bedding and waste in local government.

After the round of form filling we are allowed to enter the official registry room where you have to go because if they read the magic words in the car park it doesn't count for some reason, maybe it's a magic spell and the Tennyson Room at Ely registry office is some sort of Hogwarts annexe. The special effects are not as good as Hogwarts mind as the first thing I see was a load of plastic flowers with a string of LED fairy lights wrapped round them and a cheap HiFi playing a bit from The Four Seasons and my brother in law's arse in the air as he fiddles about with the volume control - really classy.

And I mean is it really necessary for the registrar to wear her huge plastic name badge with "Ms. Important McOfficial - Cambridgeshire County Council" on it through the proceedings? Look it's galling enough that I have to abase myself before local sodding government without you rubbing my nose in it. I'm surprised she didn't insist on wearing a fluorescent green tabard with "WEDDING OFFICER" emblazoned on the back to make the point.

I then get told I'm stood on the wrong side of the future Mrs Dragon and that I need to be to her right "so as her knight I can draw my sword to defend her." I dragonfully* apply some tact under the circumstances and refrain from advising Ms Important McOffical that any knights drawing any swords in my presence are going to get both nostrils set to "roast at gas mark 8 for 2 hours".

Fortunately we had the shortest form of marriage blurb but that still went on for a good 10 minutes worth of "These lovely lovely people who are lovely and starting their new lovely life of love together and we'll pretend that they haven't been all over each other like wyverns in heat for the past 18 years" sickly sweet yuk from Ms McOfficial who had resorted to that Princess Diana coy head on her shoulder stance complete with stapled on smile before we get to take a few pics and bugger off back home for a very sun not yet above the yardarm champers

I'm definitely staying married to the new official Mrs Dragon. If that's the hassle you have to go through to get wed I dread to even think about what divorce is like.

* like "manfully", only done by a dragon.

2011-09-05T10:35:00.000Z

If you follow my Twitter feed you'll know I'm gallivanting around Europe at the moment and in a couple of weeks I'm getting married so blogging will be light to non-existent for the next two or three weeks.

So here are some horse pictures from the Bundeschampionate held at Warendorf, Germany over the week... if you're into horses prepare to drool (and no, you can't afford them)

And just for giggles:

Claudia Hat 'nen Video Spiele

2011-09-01T18:23:00.001Z

17 years after its release Germany has "unbanned" the famous first person shooter game "Doom". The funniest thing reading about this was becoming re-acquainted with the German government ministry that originally did the banning, the fabulously named Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien literally "Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons"

Germany actually has this organisation that goes beyond rating media like games and films but can actually completely ban an item from sale or distribution if it is deemed "Harmful to Minors" which they define as:

Objects are considered harmful or dangerous to minors if they tend to endanger their process of developing a socially responsible and self-reliant personality.

What actually happened in practice was that items on the "index" were only available through certain outlets like sex shops.

I first came upon this "Won't somebody think of the chiiiiildren!" nightmare organisation some years ago through a German punk outfit "Die Ärtze" (The Doctors) who had one of their songs banned by the blue noses at the BPjM; it was a lovely little ditty about a girl called Claudia and her German Shepherd dog, went something like this...

Claudia hat nen Schäferhund
und den hat sie nicht ohne Grund,
Abends springt er in ihr Bett
und dann geht es rund!

Yes, it's rather rude but it really does beggar belief that some serious, educated people sat around in a room and went "Yes this song will encourage our young women to experiment with bestiality, better ban it."

So as a result of the ban Die Ärtze were forbidden to sing this song at their concerts.

But as technically only the lyrics were banned what they used to do was play the song as an instrumental. The audience used to sing it.

I can just imagine some Mary Whitehouse type watching thousands of teenagers singing..

Claudia mag keine Jungs
Und sie ist auch nicht lesbisch,
am allerliebsten mag sie es,
mit ihrem Hundchen untern Esstisch!

... at the tops of their voices as she slowly turned purple with impotent rage.

Dura lex sed lex

2011-09-01T07:13:00.000Z

So the Dale Farm do-what-you-likey-pikeys are about to recieve a little visit from Mr and Mrs Bulldozer and their son Master Wreckingball.

Good. Although they seemed quite happy to resort to the law to keep their illegally built eyesore the have been handed their arses on a plate and found out that the law works both ways and it really doesn't matter if you don't think that the law applies to you or you should be allowed to do whatever the fuck you like with land you own, the law says it does apply to you and you can't. Dura lex sed lex; the law is hard but it is the law.

Look I'm no great fan of the state and many planning laws are just bloody stupid - for example when building my stable block I had to prepare and submit a flood evacuation plan, for a horse, on land that last flooded when it was a swamp back in the eighteenth century. However I would posit that the planning rules serve a purpose to stop selfish bastards doing what the hell they like with no thought for the misery it causes other people If I'd wanted to build an open air nightclub with a gigawatt sound system then it would only be right and proper that my neighbours would have the right to make representation to a planning body of the harm such an action would cause to their lives and freedoms and for that body to weigh the evidence and maybe decide that my freedom to party does not outweigh my neighbours freedom to get a decent night's kip and so no you can't have your nightclub.

And I differ from my more extreme libertarians on this notion that if you own something then it is yours to do with as you wish. For example as many of my readers know I own horses and there are various things I can't do with them, for example use certain kinds of harness or shock collars for training or, coming back to our friends in the "travelling community", take it into a river in Appleby and drown the poor beast. This is because we, as a society through our elected representatives, have decided that to do so is not acceptable and because we know some callous git would do these things we make laws and erect a system of justice to ensure people are held to those laws.

And whilst the law is hard it is moveable. Remember bottysex used to be illegal and now it isn't? The law can be changed by people agitating and petitioning the lawmakers for a change. The residents of Dale Farm and their fellows are perfectly at liberty to make their case to change the law and, if by some miracle and in a parallel universe where your average traveller is a nice, polite, honest person who actually gives a shit about other people, they get opinion on their side then the law will eventually change.

It's not a perfect system by any means as there are always those, usually with money and power, who will subvert the law, or set themselves up above the law, but given the nature of human beings it's probably the best we can do. You can always break the law, or ignore it, but you have to be aware that there will be consequences.

And in this case the consequences are large, yellow and have "JCB" written on the side.

Hiding the bodies.

2011-08-31T06:21:00.005Z

It's clean, it's green, its the body dissolving machine! http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14114555

OK so this hi-tech version of John George Haigh's acid bath might be a very clever way of turning granny into soup but its still using up energy (you don't get to 180 Celsius and 10,000 hPa for free) so how about we do this the old fashioned way, it's called "burial".

In my world it would work like this. You build a few big frozen storage places around the country and when people croak they get sent there, medical and dental students get to have a bit of practice at taking out the metal fillings and granny's hip replacements and then the bodies are put on ice in a dimly lit freezer. These facilities would pay for themselves as they could be rented out to the BBC every year for yet another episode of Torchwood which always seems to be set in places like this. This would have the added benefit of giving comfort to the relatives of the deceased as they would be able to picture their loved ones lying there whilst John Barrowman runs past them in tight-fitting trousers, an RAF coat and a hammy American accent.

Anyway once you have enough bods you go out to a big plantation, dig a bunch of holes, put a body in each one and then plant a tree on top. The body rots, fertilises the young tree so it gets off to a good start and in 50 years you can cut down the tree and use the wood, dig up any remaining bones and crush them up - the resulting grit is handy for spreading on ice in the winter.

All in all 100% eco-friendly and carbon neutral.

It's what granny would have wanted

Religious idiot in a silly robe gets a legal slap

2011-08-24T06:15:00.004Z

Just for a change this time the religious loon wasn't a member of one of the various kiddy-fiddling christian factions, nor even one of the "Religion of Peace"® but this chap.

Yep, it's Arthur Pendragon. Self-appointed Druid leader (which is kind of like those "Community Leaders" who pop up all puffed up with their sense of self importance and everyone around them going "don't recall voting you into office matey") and head of the "Loyal Arthurian Warband" (all four of them - I met them once when I was on the same bill as "Arthur" here and all they were up to making war on was several pints of beer)

Actually he's pretty harmless, just eccentric in the finest British tradition. But it's important that any believers in any flavour of sky-fairy nonsense get a slap when then start to come out with crap like:

Pendragon, who represented himself, said the bones were remains of members of the "royal line" or "priest caste" who could have been the "founding fathers of this great nation".

for which of course he has the square-root of fuck-all's evidence. However it is a threat to him if the clever chaps with their DNA sequencers and electron microscopes up in Sheffield can actually find out who these bodies belong to and it turns out they were, lets say, executed prisoners thrown in a pit to pacify whatever sky-fairy the locals were in terror of 5000 years ago.

And whoever that sky-fairy and whatever his/her religious practices were it's a racing certainty that they would be utterly alien and unrecognisable to the modern cuddly pagans and druids we have today.

(Disclaimer: Back in my 20's I used to believe in all that pagan stuff... I grew out of it)

Pockets of Resistance

2011-08-23T06:26:00.003Z

Well our latest foray in military meddling in the Middle East is coming to a close. Even if, as it looks, the Gaddafi loyalists have fallen back to make a last stand in Tripoli this is the end game; no resupply of food or weapons, it's now just a matter of time. Everyone's favourite comedy dictator is probably pacing around his bunker, throwing coloured pencils at a map of Tripoli and ranting at his remaining generals "Downfall" style.

Now as we are all aware Gaddafi is as mad a box of frogs and may really believe all of Libya loves him and will rise and fight to the bitter end but I don't think he's that batshit crazy. So why didn't he flee when it was obvious that he'd lost? Well maybe the fact that the International Criminal Court have already said they would like a quiet chat with him over tea and ontbijtkoeken in The Hague with regard to, you know, war crimes and stuff might have had more than a part to play.

Back in the day when the gig was up your average dictator went round to the central bank, hoovered up everything in transferable assets and flew the presidential plane to some equally totalitarian state and proceeded to live a quiet life with just the occasional interviewer from "Time" magazine to break the monotony. Sure not very comforting to the relatives of said dictator's victims but it did tend to mean that revolutions when they happened were relatively short.

The trouble I think with these courts is that they don't really seem to work. They don't act as a deterrent as the people committing war crimes don't every think they'll have to stand trial because, well, they're going to win the war of course. It also smacks of "victor's justice" - if perhaps a certain Mr Blair were to stand trial for engaging in a war of aggression on a false pretext then the courts might seem to be at least fair and impartial. Finally if anything they maybe are costing lives, prolonging conflicts as leaders who are shoe-ins for a few weeks of stand-up freeform ranting in a perspex box somewhere in Holland, decide they have nothing to lose so might as well hang on to the last bullet.

I can see why there's a desire for a war trials court, it's a noble ideal, but I can't help think that is this case like many other noble ideals done out of the finest motives it's just making things worse

What a doughnut

2011-08-19T06:50:00.006Z

The first of the looters in Manchester are being hauled before the beak this week. Now down in the smoke it was kids kicking in the windows of Currys and strolling off with a Sony Bravia. Not in Manchester:

A man who helped himself to doughnuts from a Krispy Kreme shop during riots in Manchester city centre has been jailed for 16 months.

Apparently his excuse was he was hungry:

He was not involved in rioting but took the doughnuts because he was hungry, having spent his money on tobacco

oh and before he bought his tabs:

Thomas Downey, 48, was released from HMP Manchester at 19:30 BST on 9 August when he became caught up in the riots. The serial offender went to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous before downing a bottle of sherry.

That 12 step programme is working a treat I see.

According to the article on the Beeb's website this bloke has over 100 convictions for 233 offences.

You know I try to feel sorry for people like this, I really do (deep down I am actually quite a caring dragon) but I have to ask myself wouldn't it be better if people like Thomas and the few thousand other Thomases out there, you know the 0.1% of the population that cause 95% of the trouble, could just be put somewhere away from the rest of us? Hell give them access to booze, drugs and 24/7 porn or something but isolate the infection so the rest of us can just get on with doing our everyday stuff without Mr Sherry and Doughnuts wandering into view and kicking off on a booze and sugar rush.

Mind you the one man I do not have any sympathy for is this loser:

Father-of-four Anthony Winder, 38, looted the Swarovski Crystal store and smashed a display cabinet to get an ornamental dog, the court heard.

You actually wanted a Swarovski crystal dog? You deserve to be executed for crimes against taste.

Showers, moderate becoming cabbages later

2011-08-18T05:08:00.002Z

... Channel Light Vessel Automatic: south west variable 3 or 4, 1012 falling slowly, showers, good...

You know you are up far, far too early when the comforting ritual words of the Shipping Forecast are on Radio 4 as you drive to the station. So why am I up at crack of sparrow-fart today. Well for a start it's August and that means everyone on the team who has rugrats absolutely must have a couple of weeks off with their spawn. Consequently those that don't like me end up holding the fort whilst the Project Manager, Team Lead and one of the senior developers bugger off en famille to Lanzagrotty, Disney World in an American Swamp or Bournemouth respectively. Even the intern has buggered off for the week as he needs to resit a couple of exams he cocked up. So its down to me to be the "senior manager" (hah!) on the ground to mop the fevered brows of our traders should they take a dislike to the particular shading of an "OK" button on any of our applications this morning.

So there I am on the train, another wage slave, with a few other bleary-eyed companions trundling through Cambridgeshire in some clapped-out carriage we'll all have to pay 13% more for next year.

Now I don't know if you know the area between Ely and Cambridge, it's called "The Fens" and up until the 1800's it was just marsh, bog and shifting rivers. Then the happy collision of a clever Cloggie called Vermuiden and a load of free labour in the shape of prisoners of war from the little spat we were having with Napoleon came together to construct drainage channels (and these are no mere ditches, one is called "The Hundred Foot River" because that's how wide it is, it's 18 miles long and straight as a die, you can see it from space) and turned the area into fertile, productive land to feed the growing cities of the 19th century.

It was this I was bimbling through now. Flat as a pancake and acre upon acre of every kind of salad crop you can think of. It was before 6am and already there is plenty of activity; these big rectangular tents on wheels moving back and forth which house the pickers and packers working the rows of lettuce.

And I can tell you now every single of those will be from Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, anywhere but here.

I don't begrudge them the work, they work bloody hard; the ones I've met in the market towns around here, Wisbech, Downham Market, Ely, are all polite and don't cause any bother.

But why the hell am I paying for a whole fecking underclass of zero-achievement ferals who have a sense of entitlement but no sense of responsibility who right now are tucked up in bed sleeping off the booze, dope and a hard night's looting of the local branch of JD Sports whilst I'm hauling my green scaly tail into London at 5 in the bleeding morning? There's work out there, tons of it, but it's been done by the aforementioned Eastern Europeans. Take a look at this from the Telegraph today

This is just not bloody on. If the state is to have a role here it is as a facilitator and broker. You have no job but you are fit and healthy, well here's a job, 50 hours a week picking cabbages. Here's your bus fare, your new employer will sort out some temporary housing.

What's that? It's demeaning? How are you supposed to use your DJing and Hip Hop dance skills in a cabbage field? Well fucking boo-hoo, let me call the whaaaaaambulance for you. Walk off the job and no money for you matey.

But you're unemployable because you perpetually skipped school and the only way you know how to talk is in a language that is a cross between pseudo Jamaican patois and the sounds a rutting pig makes? Just how much do you need to communicate to be able to pick a lettuce?

---
PS: Welcome to everyone who's arriving here from Old Holborn's blog and a big thanks to the masked maker of mischief and all-round thorn in the side of government for the link.

Haunted by the ghost of Macpherson

2011-08-09T06:23:00.004Z

So now we cower in fear of a bunch of 100 or so teenage hoodies smashing up the place and nicking phones and tellies.

Well we let it happen, you and I. Sure some black kid got stabbed by a bunch of white thugs and plod make a horlicks of the investigation and so along comes the Macpherson report and lo and behold the police are "institutionally racist" and for years afterwards it's diversity this and kid-gloves that, maybe it needed to happen but it went way, way too far. Then along comes NuLabour with a new law every 32 nanoseconds and anyone who so much as raises his voice at anyone doing wrong or breaching the peace is descended on like the proverbial ton of bricks and hauled away as the miscreant.

"The police will protect you," we were told, "do not get involved, call the police, that is what they are there for, they're trained you see and have been on the relevant diversity and health and safety courses and wear florescent jackets. You, citizen, are not qualified. And don't you even dare think of arming yourself to protect your life, family and property. Trust in us, the police will be there."

Only now we see that Faustian bargain was just that. The police aren't there, they're not going to help, they will not stand there and protect your property or your life. Sure they might trawl facebook when this is over and nick the few mouthbreathers who were stupid enough to put "this is me an' me mates looting PC World innit" photos online but that's scant comfort to the asian corner shop keeper who's seem his livelyhood taken from him by the feral youth that decades of softly-softly policing, lefty pandering to the feckless, celebrity above talent and hard work culture and, quite frankly, not one us feeling we are able to stand up to insolent and loutish behaviour has created.

The scumbags perpetrating these mass lootings don't just think they are immune, they know they are untouchable. There are no consequences, even if caught they'll jet some token community sentence and an ASBO badge of honour.

This has, I would posit, gone too far for any remedial tinkering by our spineless politicians. If we want our communities back we will have to fight for them. What you won't see in the mainstream media today is the reports of mainly Turkish shopkeepers arming themselves with baseball bats and banding together to protect their businesses. Of 400 mainly asian young men fighting off 100 or so mainly afro-carribean youths in East London who were set on looting and causing mayhem. You need the very tools the rioters themselves use to get these stories.

We do have an answer. It's quite an old one, dates back to 1791 and it goes like this:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

I predict a riot

2011-08-08T06:27:00.002Z

Well we have riots, recession and a Tory lead government so I guess all we need now is for OMD and Duran Duran to be back in the charts and it'll be just like that '80s

I find it rather telling that the good citizens (ha!) of Tottenham can get all antsy and smashing up the place when The Babylon put a cap in one of their local criminal entrepreneurs but when said criminals are shooting each other up then you don't hear a bloody peep from them. And what is it with rioters and looters, I mean you live there so why do you trash your own streets and shops? I mean I've been to Tottenham and it is a complete shithole so I'd be surprised that this morning apart from a few shoe boxes formerly containing trainers scattered around the high street anyone would notice a difference but why not nip down the road and smash up somewhere else?

And why on earth of all places did you want to loot a branch of discount carpet retailer Carpet Right? What the feck got into your head that said "I want justice, I want an end to police brutality, and I want a free roll of axminster for my granny's flat"

Apparently they queued up to loot JD Sports. Well we may be having a riot but we never forget we are English and queueing up is what we do.

Loldragon and the most incompetent phishing attempt ever

2011-08-05T16:04:00.003Z

This has to be the lamest phishing attempt ever. As you can probably guess from the language it's from the Lads from Lagos and they're attempting to get their hands on accounts so they can pull the "Hi I'm stuck in wherever and lost my wallet please send me $$$$ many through Western Onion" scams.

Yahoo! Mail

VERIFY YOUR YAHOO MAIL ACCOUNT NOW TO AVIOD IT CLOSED

This Email is from YAHOOMAIL Customer Care and we are sending it to very EMAIL YAHOO User Accounts Owner for safety. we are having congestions due to the anonymous registration of YAHOO accounts so we are shutting down some of the accounts and your account was among those to be deleted. We are sending this email to you so that you can verify and let us know if you still want to use this account. If you are still interested please confirm your account by filling the space below.Your User name, password, date of birth and your country information would be needed to verify your account.

Due to the congestion in all YAHOO users and removal of all unused YAHOO Accounts, We would be shutting down all unused Accounts, You will have to confirm your E-mail by filling out your Login Information below after clicking the reply button, or your account will be suspended within 24 hours for security reasons.
Yahoo! Mail

* Username: .....................................
* Password: ......................................
* Date of Birth: ................................ .
* Country Or Territory: .................... .

After following the instructions in the sheet, your account will not be interrupted and will continue as normal. Thanks for your attention to this request. We apologize for any inconveniences.

Warning!!! Account owner that refuses to update his/her account after two weeks of receiving this warning will lose his or her account permanently.
Sincerely,
The YAHOO Webmail
VERIFY YOUR YAHOO MAIL ACCOUNT NOW,

I don't normally reply to these of course because they have almost no scam-baiting potential but just for once...

Oh noes! This is the very badness! Noooo they be taking my accounts!

U not to close or I be mads at U very much yes!

Here is logons!!!!

name: etheliusthedragon@yahoo.com
password: ihavesexwithgoats
date of bith: I hatch on 21 March 1324BC on moyntin in Syria from egg (I is draggon!)
country: is amerrica (but I flys here myself so not have green card or anything, you not be tell INS OK or I sets you on fire!)

Ok

Peeace!

Ethelius
(I really is draggon too! srsly!)

Loldragon FTW

Jaded

2011-08-01T16:52:00.003Z

I wander back to my desk this afternoon having made myself a cup of tea to find the team leader of the mob across the corridor from us (let's call him Berk for now) excitedly chatting to my project manager.

What is the cause of all this excitement.

Well it turns out that Berk has had this brilliant idea (that he's nicked from Failbook - so you know this isn't going to end well) to get a team together to deliver some application to our users in one 24 hour period, that is starting first thing in the morning, working all day and then pulling an all nighter.

I was just about to say "what the fuck have you been snorting Berk" when I see my PM nodding his head faster that the Churchill Insurance dog on crystal meth. "Wow yeah, it's great, we can really show what we can deliver."

What you will deliver if you go ahead with this is a pile of cack built of compromise, quick hacks, hard coded "variables" and so many fudges you could open a branch of Thorntons; further more said "product" will perform like a mastodon on quaaludes and have all the grace and functionality of a 1960's era Trabant. And this abomination you are going to put onto a trader's desktop 24 hours after the project starts and expect them to use it live??? Jesus this just has "EPIC FAIL" written all over it in eight foot high neon pink letters.

I just could not believe sane IT Professionals were seriously going to go ahead with this - this fuckup in the making already has a venue booked where the 8 "volunteers" will be doing the coding - but there they were, thinking this is the greatest thing since the invention of the database. Bert has even got the head IT manager to stump up for the pizzas and coke.

I think they could tell by my expression that I wasn't really buying into this plan so Bert tried "Well we'll be strictly using Extreme Programming techniques! Paired programming! Test driven development!" - Yeah cut your hands on keyboards by 50% before you even start, why not handicap the team even further by paying someone to come round and kick them in the goolies every hour whilst you're at it. "Oh and I'm going to be making a time lapse film of the 24 hours" Hey and why not put that Benny Hill "Yakety Sax" music over the top of it, that'll make us all look like the highly trained and experienced artisans we are won't it.

Anyway after a while my PM started to realise that I wasn't going to stop making my "If Berk says one more fucking word he's getting a dose of the breath weapon set to 'Heart of the Sun'" face and decides to save Berk from immolation and goes "Oh maybe this would be a good thing for our graduate coder of all of 2 years experience". I nod and project passive-aggressive body language making it clear that everybody better leave my workspace right now and leave the grumpy dragon to his tea.

I don't know, maybe I've been too long in this gig and I'm just jaded. I just cannot see this being anything other than a stupid stunt to raise Bert's profile which will end up being a complete train wreck and will take a hell of a lot longer than 24 hours and more than 8 people to put right. Maybe when I was younger this might have seemed interesting to do but at my age there is no way on this little ball of mud and rock that at my age I am going to voluntarily put in a 24 hour shift, certainly not for a day off in lieu and a "bonus" of a 50 quid M&S voucher and a mention in some "What IT did this week" bit of the company website nobody reads anyway.

It's not as though we couldn't see that coming

2011-07-25T06:43:00.004Z

Not once, but twice as it happens.

First the easy one, dog-faced junky warblesmith Amy Winehouse finally checks out in a haze of booze and recreational pharmaceuticals. I mean come on was anyone surprised? If I still played "dead pool" she'd have been right at the top of my list along with that other celebrity smackhead "musician" Pete Doherty. The only thing that surprised me was that it took so long.

Secondly the more difficult one, Anders Behring Breivik, and the horrible events in Norway last Friday. It would be easy to dismiss this as the actions of a lone nutter with a grudge and a thing for the Knights Templar but I think that would be too simplistic as this is clearly no fruit-loop with a swastika and a skinhead haircut; by all accounts he is lucid, intelligent and calculating. I hate to say it and I hope you don't take this the wrong way but what he did was, from a terror perspective, very clever indeed. Sets of a bomb in the capital and when everyone's attention is sorting that out he goes for his main target with a ruthless, military efficiency. This is clearly no foaming-at-the-mouth loony here.

And why did he do it, well again from what I've read it seems he had a grump that isn't that uncommon on both sides of the political spectrum, that multiculturalism and the spread of Islam has gone too far. Sure he went way, way past what I would consider a reasonable "Look, your culture isn't very nice, Sharia sucks goat cock and I really do rather resent paying for your extended family living on benefits who won't learn English so if you don't mind I think we should be more careful on how many people we let in, you're all going to have to learn our language, make a bit more of an effort to adopt our historic way of life and as to having separate courts where a woman's testimony is worth a quarter that of a man, well you can stick it where the sun doesn't shine." and wanted to drive every immigrant out of Europe in time for the anniversary of the Siege of Vienna and execute several thousand "cultural traitors" (including Prince Charles for some reason) and decided the best way to accomplish this was shoot up a camp full of kids learning centre-left politics and how to sit by a fire singing songs to a badly played acoustic guitar. Not very wise it seems to me but then wisdom != intelligence as any AD&D player will tell you.

Now what he did was wrong on every possible level and can't ever be justified but I can't help thinking that there's going to be more than a few people, especially if he gets his day in court today and says what the media are expecting him to say, thinking "You know, he might have a point."

I can't help feel that there is more than one Anders out there. I really hope that there isn't and that this is just a dreadful one-off, a Timothy McVeigh moment for Europe, but just from browsing the web, watching the news and listening to the odd conversation I sense there is a lot of simmering anger out there that isn't going away.

Note to self: start planting more veg, rear more chickens, just in case.

Knobend

2011-07-20T06:09:00.003Z

So there we were, Rupert looking and sounding like they'd just dragged him out from the Budleigh Salterton Rest Home For The Terminally Bewildered and James coming across more slippery that a weasel smeared with KY Jelly¹ and then up springs some self-styled "anarchist" (styled by everyone else "a complete knobend") and tries to pie him. Up springs Wendy the Dragon Lady and lays down a claw/claw/breath weapon attack for 10d6 damage with a side helping of ninja-style quivering palm and next days headlines write themselves and the Murdochs slip off the hook.

It's almost so convenient you'd think this Johnny Marbles tosspot had been set up to do this by News International and he'll be getting a big fat jiffy bag stuffed with twenties when this is all over.

Johnny Marbles, It's probably pronounced "Mahr-Bahlls" or something. Stupid name, more stupid guy. as Twitterer @mattplats observed:

Johnny Marbles sounds like the name of the lead singer in an unsuccessful punk band that once nearly opened for Siouxsie and the Banshees.

Speaking of Siouxie I doubt you'd get to show this any more for fear of "Offending" the mussies.

¹ Bet that image got the furries who come here searching for httyd rule 34 hot under the collar.

You're not fooling anyone

2011-07-18T06:14:00.002Z

Remember a little while back when CallMeDave was photographed catching a RyanAir flight for a weekend away in Spain? At the time I thought that it was rather suspicious that someone just happened to snap a quick piccie of Cameron being "an ordinary bloke" and taking scumbag airlines for a couple of days snatched budget holiday like the rest of the proles have to.

Turns out I was right.

The Tory leader delayed the start of his family holiday in Turkey to fly to Santorini, where he had drinks with Mr Murdoch on his 184ft yacht Rosehearty

and

Mr Cameron then accepted a second free flight to Turkey, while Mr Murdoch sailed to Corfu,

The full story is here: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/cameron-murdoch-and-a-greek-island-freebie-971470.html

Bastards the lot of them.

Reading the Banns

2011-07-15T06:29:00.003Z

I'm not sure if they actually do "Read the Banns" - the proclamations of marriage - any more in churches given that the last time I was actually in a church was in 1991 for my sister's wedding.

Well in any event, some 21 years after that wedding, I'm having one of my own. Yes you read that right, Mrs Dracunculus is going to become the real Mrs Dracunculus in September.

You might ask, after having lived together for 18 years, why we are bothering. Well quite frankly it's for tax reasons. We're both getting to the stage where there's the odd grey scale just by your left horn, the twinge in the wing joint and thing that goes "ping" in your back that's your bodies' way of telling you that you're quite a long way from having hatched. Now as we're not currently married if either of us shuffles off this mortal coil and goes for that audition with the Choir Invisible the remaining one will be landed with a monstrous inheritance tax bill for the half of the house the other one of us owned. If you're married, everything just transfers to the surviving partner with nothing to pay.

So you can see we're doing this for the noblest of motives, keeping our cash out of George Osborne's grubby hands.

Yesterday we did the modern equivalent of reading the banns which is called "giving notice". This involves schlepping down to a registry office which is all painted institution beige and waiting the obligatory local government 10 minutes past your appointment time whilst sundry tattooed landwhales crawled through the door and went "wanna register a baby so I can get me benefits, innit" at the receptionist. Once seen we get asked a bunch of questions some of which I could see the relevance of (like "are you related" - this is Norfolk we are talking about here^*) and some I could not, like "What was your father's profession" - I mean what has that got to do with anything?

Half an hour later we're done and 70 quid poorer and in three weeks we get out chitty that says we can do that "I do" stuff.

However whilst I was waiting to see the registrar I was watching one of those little TV Screen advertising thingies which was flashing up adverts for wedding car hire, funeral services and the like. One was for, I kid you not, wedding insurance. You can insure your wedding, I assume from being jilted at the altar or something. Anyway this advert said the average wedding cost £20,000.

Ours won't, mainly because it's us plus my sister and brother in law as witnesses in Swampland reg office first thing on Saturday morning when it's 50 quid instead of 250; then back to behind the water pipes for Tattinger and nibbles.

Who said romance was dead.

^* Chatting to the registrar apparently they have had cousins asking to marry. "We had to get the books out" she said - apparently it's two blood lines of separation.

Its not hacking

2011-07-07T16:56:00.002Z

Look everyone, ringing a mobile and entering the default "0000" voicemail PIN code does not really count as hacking. I mean its not even script kiddy level hackery. It's just the usual media feeding frenzy of talking shit up to make it sounds really big and scary.

Anyone of course is more than happy to "hack" my voicemail box where they will find plenty of titillating and scandalous messages like "Dragon, it's Mrs Dracunculus here. Can you pick up some milk on the way home" which is probably pretty much what you would find on 99.9% of everyone's mailbox.

However I cannot help but smile at what's happening to that evil cow Rebekah Brooks who, back when she was called Wade, stridently called for mob "justice" and outing paedophiles to the slavering mob; it's rather amusing to see the mob turn against her.

Not that she's lost her job yet although now with Murdoch, who is a cockwallet of the first order but no fool, disposing of the toxic News of the World that threatened to poison the whole of News International can only be part of the solution. I can't see as she could remain with the organisation.

Oh and interestingly the domain "sunonsunday.co.uk" was registered two days ago.

Coincidence?

Wiccan for a weekend

2011-07-04T06:49:00.002Z

Oh great, some numpty has come up with a crackpot scheme to "test drive" religions. Just to set you off you can go on holiday to Turkey and become a "Muslim for a Month". And if you don't fancy that you can be "Sikh for a Week" which means at least you get to go around tooled up and the plod can't do anything about it.

Actually if it has the effect on people of going "Well I was a mussie for a few weeks and I can now see what an unreformed heap of violent, misogynistic bronze age goat herding beliefs Islam is" then maybe it's all for the good. However I think there may be a downside in that, just like Facebook and the Hotel California, you're never allowed to leave, the prophet Mohammed (piss be upon him) said quite clearly "whoever changes his (islamic) religion, kill him"

As General Ackbar observed:

Sniff

2011-07-01T09:46:00.004Z

I have a cold. It is the middle of summer. the sun is shining and its 20 degrees outside and I'm sat here with aches in places I did not know I had places, the "I've been giving blowjobs to a pack of timberwolves" throat and a drippy nose.

At least I can log on to the office and do a bit of coding so that it doesn't go down as a sick day. Although the way I feel at the moment it's more a case of "Push the mouse around and read some emails" than any serious development.

Time for another Lemsip. Die rhinovirus, die!

My mental circuit breaker

2011-06-28T06:20:00.003Z

I have a circuit breaker in my brain. It trips when I try and read thinks like this which plopped into the work mailbox:

The mid-year performance review provides an opportunity to reflect on the progress you have made in the first half of 2011 and to consider any adjustments you need to make in order to deliver against your full-year targets. Please take the time to actively reflect on whether your activities are completely aligned with our strategic goals and effective in delivering for clients. For those of you who are new to the business in 2011, please ensure that you discuss performance objectives with your Line Manager and clearly understand how your contribution will help us build for the future.

Honestly I can't read stuff like this without my brain shutting down - I figure it must be some sort of defence mechanism that stops me wanting to tear into tiny shreds people who use that particular brand of "... aligned with strategic goals for delivering to clients..." management speak.

My activities are completely aligned with making sure my office chair is at just the right height, that my morning sausage sandwich is at the right temperature and that I can sneak out the door at 5.20 most days; oh and making sure that my code doesn't fall over in a steaming heap of fail because I hate fixing live faults. Hope that's strategic enough for you Mr Management person who needs to get the "all my underlings did the utterly pointless mid year review that now has zero bearing on your compensation since you got rid of the bonuses for coding monkeys like me" box ticked.

Salus populi suprema est lex

2011-06-24T16:13:00.002Z

It's Latin for "The safety of the people is the greatest law", a quotation from Cicero and a principle of justice since Roman times.

I noticed this quotation on a blog I follow, Guido Fawkes' blog as it happens (link over there on the left in the blogroll) whereby the normally sane Guido completely loses it over the Milly Dowler murder and calls for the reintroduction of the death penalty, simultaneously piddling all over his "libertarian" credentials in the process.

Look it's clear to me that Levi Bellfield is a truly evil git with all the redeeming features of a rat on PCP and what he did was truly evil. However hard cases make bad law and our laws are based on meting out justice, not vengeance; if I may be allowed some more Latin¹ Dura lex sed lex

Much as our human sensibilities, outraged by what this individual has done, call out for his destruction it is some measure of our civilisation we no longer act on these impulses; that the judge in this case has imposed a whole of life tariff is to my mind sufficient much as my inner dragon would like to turn the breath weapon to "simmer" and slowly roast the fuck to death over a few days. We cannot, we must not ever allow the state to have the ability to kill any of its citizens for they cannot be trusted with that power. How many people died at the end of Albert Pierrepoint's rope whose convictions were subsequently found to be unsafe or which were clearly wrongly allowed to be executed to suit a politician who wanted to look "tough on crime"?

If we bring the death penalty back how many more Derek Bentleys will there be because the Home Secretary² doesn't want to be seen to be letting a nasty evil peedofil off because the Daily Mail will turn on him?

¹ All dragons are required to speak Latin. It's in the code of conduct right alongside to setting fire to estate agents and advertising creatives.

² Not the current one, obviously, as he is a wet as a ducks' underwear.

How about a "Just Sod Off" button?

2011-06-24T06:31:00.004Z

This little gem popped into my mailbox the other day (you'll need to click on it to see it properly).

Quite clearly it's missing something, the "Look will you just sod off and leave me alone to do my job. That's what I come here for, I do the work and I get paid. I'm not here to "engage" with the organisation that's trying to look all responsible and cuddly in the community, I'm not here to tick some middle manager's "look I got my staff to support the official Banko Di Haggis charity" tick box for his next appraisal. I turn up, wrangle code and I piss off home; end of. Now bugger off out of my in-box" voting button.

And anyway you don't want to deprive the grumpy dragon of his morning coffee. No seriously, don't. I breathe fire.

Ring out the solstice bells

2011-06-21T10:44:00.003Z

Today is the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. My little iPhone app says the sun comes up here at around 4.30 local time.

I am so pleased that I stopped being a Wiccan. Back in the day come the solstice I used to have to haul my arse out of the sack at three in the morning and stand on a hill in a park in South London with a bunch of other fellow numpties offering thanks to a large ball of burning hydrogen 150 million kilometers away.

Yeah like it cared... "Oh thanks for that guys. I do appreciate it that you like me fusing these atoms together and making all that light and heat. In fact I'm so happy I'll carry on doing it for another year."

Ah well, at least most of the folk were OK, some good times were had and we didn't fuck anyone's life up or tell you what to believe and if you didn't Epona would come round and leave horse-poop in your letterbox and you would be condemned in the afterlife to toil in Her underground carrot mines. We were deluded but harmless deluded, bit like the elf guy.

I still got up a stupid o' clock mind you. The dogs needed walking.

Failbook - You can check out any time you like...

2011-06-18T10:55:00.002Z

... but you can never leave.

Rather amusingly this was presented to me after I had given my reason for deleting my Failbook account as "privacy concerns".

Lies, Damned Lies and the Central Limit Theorem

2011-06-17T07:23:00.002Z

Children who see their parents drunk are twice as likely to regularly get drunk themselves, a survey of young teenagers has suggested.

Poor parental supervision also raises the likelihood of teenage drinking, said the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

And in other news Pope Ratzinger confirms the catechism of the Catholic faith and a bear in the woods said "I say, do you mind, I'm having a crap".

That must have been the easiest piece of research in the universe. I hope to The Invisible Pink Unicorn (PBUH) that none of my taxes went to fund this shite.

Also we have this gem from the same "report"

In a survey of 5,700 children aged 13 to 16, carried out for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, researchers found one in five claimed to have been drunk by the time they were 14.

Yes and I recall back in the 70's when the moral panic of the day was "video nasties" that some asshat came up with a survey that showed 50% of kids under 16 had seen a splattery gore movie. Well that was until another team did a similar survey and put in a whole bunch of fake but plausible titles like "I spit on your zombie apocalypse" and, surprise, a whole load of kids claimed to have seen those too.

"Yeah I'm 13 and I've been drunk loads and shagged seven girls" - no you haven't you're just bigging yourself up you nauseating adolescent, now get back to your WiiBox360 won't you.

Whilst the rest of the adult world prepares for yet more taxes on booze because we have to "protect the little kiddies"

Slow Motion Train Wrecks

2011-06-16T07:13:00.001Z

The first of these happened between 5 and 6 pm yesterday when Labour leader Ed Milliband for some utterly unfathomable reason decided to get "hip" and "down" with the youth and host a "Ask Ed Milliband" session on microblogging site Twitter (follow me! go on, there's a little button over there on the left). Now if you're not on Twitter you might not know that generally the posts on there tend to lean more to the left than the right so do doubt some fresh faced SpAd^* in Millipede's office thought that this would be a wizard wheeze for Red Ed and he'd get a nice smooth ride.

Wrong. Very Very Wrong.

What followed was everyone, nicely anonymous, proceeded to fire of a metric fuckton of generally witty put-down questions poking holes in the pretentious prat who was no doubt expecting fawning questions along the lines of "Why are you so brilliant and the nasty Tories so rotten at everything?" Generally speaking we really don't like politicians, especially when they make such obvious faux "engage with the people" stunts as this so what he got was more along these lines:

"If a train leaves Paddington at 1136, carrying 200 commuters, what time will the RMT bring it to a standstill?"
"Where did Ed Balls touch you? Show us on the doll."
"Was Brutus an honourable man? Discuss."
"If you fell through a crack in the universe would anyone notice?"
"Lenin or Trotsky?"

And my favourite, which I retweeted "How would you solve the Kobayashi Maru scenario"

After answering six or seven questions and managing to lie on one of them (he claimed to have not voted for Labours' planned 90 day detention whereas he supported it fully) he buggered off, probably to fire the SpAd who came up with the idea in the first place.

And speaking of firing brings me nicely along to the second train wreck of the evening. my guilty pleasure^** of the schadenfreude which is "The Apprentice". Now if you've never watched this show what happens is that they pick twelve or so of the most loathsome "young enterpeneurs" they could corrall into a cage and then arm them with knives and the one with the most sticking out of their back at the end of the programme is declared the loser and is ritually humiliated by a man who gave the world shitty cheap lousy sounding HiFi systems and the em@ailer - a device so utterly pointless you really do wonder how nobody actually said "Er Alan... about this souped up telephone, you do realise that it's a pile of crocodile shit don't you?" to him at any point.

Anyway last nights episode was poetry in motion as one of the more loathsome charcoal-grey suited cretins, the one they are bigging up into the series bad-guy steered his team to spectacular defeat by not only creating a magazine more offensive and patronising than the rival's team mid 90's eaa "Loaded" rip off but proceeded to cock up the "sell ad space" bit of the task by failing to do that most basic of business activities, negotiating on the price. "He's gone," says Mrs Dragon as he gets hauled into the boardroom and poked by Lordsugar, "He has to go, his mag idea, his design, he lost the sale"

"Not a chance, he's here to the interview stage, he's this season's Tre Azam, the series baddy, they'll keep him in"

And they did. The Apprentice is a pure entertainment show, they don't even make a pretence at it being fair and you know damned well the winner has been selected before the cameras begin to roll on episode one.

Oh and the real kicker this year is that Lordsugar (I preferred Siralan) has had enough of employing the winning numpty and this year is giving the winner £250,000 to start their own business. But even accounting for the fact that £250,000 isn't actually a whole load of money these days to start any sort of business that needs any kind of capital spend up front it's not all cold, hard cash because the quarter million is in "cash and value" and I'm guessing the "value" is several hours of Lordsugars time (charged at 500 quid an hour) so the winner can benefit from his massive business brain.

The winner might want to take a long hard look at that e-m@ailer before he or she uses that "value" part of the deal

* Special Adviser: basically some young spotty gopher who one day wants to become a real politician and make shitloads of money off mine and your backs. They should all be rounded up and shot.

** Along with the Eurovision Song Contest, riding bareback and collecting 80's era digital synthesizers.

This blog really is being written by a dragon

2011-06-14T10:51:00.003Z

There seems to be a big fuss in the "Blogosphere" at the moment that for some reason has leaked out into the mainstream media for some unknown reason. Basically what's happened is that somebody was blogging pretending to be a lesbian in Syria protesting at the government and it turns out that it was really some bloke in Scotland making it all up. And now someone who ran a lesbian website with the truly awful name "LezGetReal" has been exposed as a straight bloke and not really "Paula Brooks" who wore comfortable shoes and really liked watching tennis. Here's al-ja-beeba on the subject

Anyway everyone seems to be getting their panties in a bunch about this, how it's "deceitful" and "harmful" and other bad things ending in "ul". Er guys, this is the Interwebs here? What on earth made you think that everything on it has to be true? I think the problem here is that a lot of people using Teh Intertubes have become conditioned to think that it's all real. Nothing could be further from the truth; I'll bet that a good proportion of websites and blogs are at the very least "embellished" versions of reality if not out and out fictions (call them "exercises in creative writing" if you like). The (in)famous website 4Chan has a banner over it's famous /b/ section which reads "The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact." Maybe that should flash up on everybody's browsers when they open them up.

However I can assure you that I really am a very well disguised small green dragon and I do live behind the water-pipes in Norfolk. Honest. Would I lie to you?

A fiver in the collecting tin

2011-06-13T06:34:00.001Z

There's been quite a lot about foreign aid in the news recently thanks to CallMeDave's commitment to ring-fence 0.7% of GDP on dishing out handouts to, well, basically anyone it seems including China who are building themselves an aircraft carrier when we have just had to scrap ours and borrow one from the Frenchies because we're broke and rather "amusingly" handing money hand over fist to India who are happy to pocket development aid and spend it on a manned space programme.

Now I've nothing against space exploration but when that nice Mr Osborne comes along and rapes my wallet every month I'd like to think that any space exploration is being done employing British engineers, scientists and astronauts and not a Mr Patel from the Mumbai Space Lab whilst, not 5km from Mr Patel's gaff, some baby is starving to death in a gutter.

And don't even get me started on Africa.

So what to do. The problem here is, I feel, money, Or rather "cash". It's easy to stick your hand in your pocket and shove a fiver into a collection tin - makes you feel a bit better about yourself and that you're "doing something" and not really caring that maybe up to 80% of that fiver has gone on "admin" or "paying the people who run the charity a big fat salary and renting those prime offices in the middle of London and of course those Herman Miller Aeron chairs don't buy themselves darling", for that is what "admin" actually means. So it is with governments. CallMeDave and every other fuckwit politico can look all big and generous on the world stage, a great philanthropist (with other people's money though - ours) and he really could not give a crap that 80% of this is going to end up in President Mwombawomba's "I need a new jet because the Lear-45 is so last year" fund and Mrs Ouagadougou and her four kids are still going to be living in the same mud hut with no sanitation or running water in five years from now.

No. What we should send is not money, but people. We have a lot of those, some of them quite clever and well educated. Instead of sending out a metric fuckton of cash why not send out accountants, bankers and policemen to help sort out corruption and the money supply, send some more bankers (see they are useful for something) to teach the locals how to set up credit unions and microfinance, teachers to raise literacy and educate especially women (something proven to reduce poverty), geologists and engineers to show the locals how to drill for water and run an electricity grid that works more than 4 hours a day.

Sure it costs money but look at all those kids coming out of university with all those newfound skills and a shedload of debt. How about HM Gov. saying "OK you go out to Durkadurkastan for two years, we pay off your student loan and tuition fees and pay you minimum wage for the duration - now go help build a sewage plant and teach the locals how to run it."

That way I see it, everyone wins, the folk of Durkadurkastan get clean water and learn how to run the infrastructure so they can make more, our raw graduates get shedloads of practical experience they can use when they come back and CallMeDave still gets to strut around the world stage like some superannuated peacock. The only people who lose out are the President Mwombawombas of the world which is no bad thing. Hey we even get to spread some of our culture around the world - well if it's OK for the rest of the world to bring their culture here then it must be fine for that traffic to flow the other way, right?

But it's all a bit harder than metaphorically sticking your hand in your wallet and stuffing a fiver in the tin. So it'll never happen.

Thirsty

2011-06-10T06:39:00.004Z

Well down here behind the water pipes in Norfolk I can't help noticing that there's not so much water in said pipes at the moment and al-ja-beeba tells me this morning that we are officially in drought.

Well yes it has been dry, the paddocks look like shite (not got any horses on them at the moment which is lucky or they would be going hungry) and all my lettuce and rocket keeps bolting to seed but the cool stuff is still coming out of the taps for now.

Apparently the practical upshot of this "official drought" is that farmers won't be able to abstract as much water out of the rivers to water crops. Interestingly that doesn't seem to be much of a problem for the farmers around where the dragon's lair is as they aren't watering their crops that much. Normally the diesel pumps would be running 24/7 this time of year if they were growing their normal potato crop but everyone seems to have switched to wheat and its not hard to see why:

The price of wheat for forward delivery (that's essentially what a "future" is - a contract to deliver wheat at a set price at a future date) had doubled in the past year so it's natural that they're going to grow what makes the most money.

Shame though - there were always a few maris pipers left over after the harvest that if you wanted to you'd never need to buy a potato again.

Doing your thinking for you

2011-06-09T12:12:00.003Z

So I haven't written much recently. So what, neither has Shakespeare.

Well I've been thinking about getting back into blogging recently (and was kind of goaded into it by my fellow blogger Steve over at Natural Yoghurt). Mainly I took some time out as, well, I used to just grump about the government and general fuckwittery of my fellow inhabitants of planet Earth and a change of government last year kind of felt like a breath of fresh air. Well that air is getting rather stale and this week it took on a decided whiff of "hang on, doesn't this smell like the same bullshit we had before".

First up we have the latest "oh no, evil peeeedofils! Little kiddywinks are dressing up in "suggestive" clothing and being sexualised" - whatever the feck sexualised means. Of course the answer here is not to look at why there is a demand for a padded bikini top for an eight year old - because all the shops are doing is responding to that demand from their customers - but of course reach for the ban hammer, the first, last and only weapon of the lazy, mob-ruled politician.

Maybe if we took a good luck at what our culture has become, little more than panem et circenses which teaches us all you need to be a success is to kick a pig's bladder around or perform some "raunchy" dance routine and win a talent contest (that's rigged anyway, see here) we might see why kids want to look "cool" and "sexy" because that's all that seems to count. Education, manners, learning to be a decent and engaged citizen? Nah, I'm gonna win celebrity come X factor's got talent and get rich and shit, innit.

And fresh from pandering to this along comes the British Board of Film Classification, a bunch of middle class cunt-trumpets who apparently have this amazing insight into the processes in my brain and have determined that if I watch a certain film by the name of "Human Centipede II" I will be so mentally damaged that I'll start going around and stitching human beings together with Mrs Dracunculus' Toshiba sewing machine ¹. OK now having glanced at the plot of this film which seems to involve masturbating with sandpaper, coprophilia and rape with fencing materials I can tell you here and now that I won't be "damaged" at all by this piece of crap because I will under no circumstances be watching it as I would like to retain the contents of my stomach but surely that, as an adult, is my decision and not that of some faceless committee meeting in a room in London somewhere. I've no problem with them placing "ratings" on films, saying "This film contains explicit scenes of X, Y, Z and Justin Beiber and is therefore only suitable for adults and throwing in the bin" so parents can make an informed decision on what their kids see but a flat out "you can't see this, we think it will warp your tiny little minds you ordinary people" is as offensive as the movie they just banned.

Meet the new boss, just the same as the old boss.

¹ Which as I have utterly failed to figure out how it works on no less than three occasions would mean some very lumpy and misshapen aberrations walking around Norfolk - not that anyone would notice.

A Walmart Employee Writes...

2011-03-07T21:53:00.000Z

Shamelessly stolen from 4Chan/b/

Walmartfag again. Also, don't be afraid of security cameras, unless you're in electronics, cosmetics, or the backroom. That's right, Walmart couldn't care less who you are, or what you steal unless you're in electronics, cosmetics, or you work there. They monitor the associates, especially when you go into the backroom, more than anything else. At any other given time, most of the bragged about 300 security cameras aren't even on. That includes the parking lot. Do you know why? To cut costs. Takes money to run those things, and takes money to hire more than one Cost-Prevention associate to check all those tapes every day. We have roughly two at our store, one that watches the monitors all day, the live feed. We have one manager that reviews the overnight footage of the backrooms and the two aforementioned departments. But I don't count here because she's technically a manager. The only other security detail we have is a plain-clothes associate who wanders the store, hiding in plain sight behind racks of women's clothes and thinks he's invisible. He also thinks you don't notice when he's passed by you for the third time looking directly at you, or standing five feet behind, staring at you. We also have two elderly security guards hired by a private company, one to sit by the door, one to drive around the parking lot, and sleep. Seriously. Caught the guy sleeping I don't know how many times. Or reading. Cause you can see crime from behind a book. Oh, and another note about Mr. Not-Invisible, if he recognizes an associate, he'll stalk you around the store. Quasi-trained, worse-than-rent-a-cops, Walmart's answer to keeping you safe. Oh, and another way to avoid that guy, go at night. No security, and even fewer cameras working. We have no security other than the sleeping geriatric in the car. That's it.

That's you religiots told.

2011-03-01T10:34:00.002Z

Yes, yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

"We cannot avoid the need to re-state what ought to be, but seemingly are not, well understood principles regulating the relationship of religion and law in our society.

We live in this country in a democratic and pluralistic society, in a secular state not a theocracy.

Although historically this country is part of the Christian West, and although it has an established church which is Christian, there have been enormous changes in the social and religious life of our country over the last century.

Our society is now pluralistic and largely secular. We sit as secular judges serving a multi-cultural community of many faiths. The laws and usages of the realm do not include Christianity, in whatever form.

The aphorism that “Christianity is part of the common law of England” is mere rhetoric.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/8353527/Foster-parent-ban-this-is-a-secular-state-say-High-Court-judges.html

Now, all you twunts at the Christian Legal Centre who keep bringing all these fucking ridiculous cases kindly sod off and stop bothering the rest of us.

Poe's law in action

2011-02-07T18:28:00.006Z

Poor old Australia has been in the wars of late, floods, tornadoes and bush-fires making things down under as rough as a dingo's arse (as they probably say in Aus). However someone pointed me towards this blog post regarding the same. Yep it's all down to the amazing power of botty-sex again! You let gays do each other up the bum and pow, next thing you know your shrimps are floating off the barbie and out to sea.

Do go and have a read if you have a moment, and have a look at some of the rest of his postings, all of them equally batshit insane; I mean real frothing at the mouth and howling at the moon crazy. So completely fucked up in the head you sit there thinking "This has to be a spoof. No-one is this mental." Which brings us to Poe's Law which states that:

“Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing.”

The parody "Landover Baptists" site used to be a very good example of this, nowadays they do have the "blatant display of humour" but in the past you'd quite often see people posting "WTF are these guys serious" comments in various fora. But for every parody there are real mad Christian (and every other religion I am sure) sites like the odious "god hates fags / America / pretty much anyone that isn't Fred Phelps" family of bile ridden tripe.

Which brings us onto Bob Hutton. Now I really cannot for the life of me tell if this is a piss take or not, it's almost a perfect example of Poe's law in action.

I'm pretty sure it's a spoof though.

I bloody well hope so, I'm really not comfortable sharing the planet with Mr Hutton if he's for real.

Mid life crisis - Dragon gets a Yamaha

2011-01-24T17:44:00.006Z

Look what Mrs Dracunculus bought me for my birthday.

That, if you don't know, is the mighty Yamaha DX7, really the first digital synthesizer ever to be made affordable.

Well it was affordable if you were a professional musician or had wealthy parents. I wasn't and didn't but when I was 18 and lugging my Korg Delta - all I could afford - around the occasional pub and working men's club gig this was the synth I wanted. Hell it was the synth everyone wanted and as a consequence you just need to hit one of the main bank presets, hit a key and you're back in the 80's - that tubular bell "bongggg" (preset #26) has for example graced every Enya recording ever made, that electric piano (the DX7 was very good at metallic percussive sounds) is all over "Hard Habit to Break" by Chicago. I've spent the weekend poking around on this and going "oooh isn't that what Kraftwerk used on..." or sounding like 80's backing music from Colin Baker era Dr Who (it also appears the BBC radiophonic workshop never bothered pressing any of the presets above #6!)

Mind you one thing I had forgotten about was synths of that era are very heavy, the DX7, like my old Korg, was metal cased and built to take a lot of "on the road" punishment. Unlike my more modern kit like my 90's era Kawai K1-II or the Korg Triton this keyboard comes with a weightlifting course.

I love it to bits and I haven't even started programming it yet. It's the keyboard I always wanted as a kid and now I have a lovely example. Mrs Dracunculus says she got away easy with my mid life crisis and she's very pleased I didn't buy one of Yamaha's other products that have two wheels and do 0 to 60 in five nanoseconds.

Prejudiced... we haven't even started yet

2011-01-20T18:47:00.002Z

So Tory token mussie and all round gobshite Baroness Warsi has opened her flappy mouth and come up with this corker:

Prejudice against Muslims has "passed the dinner-table test" and become socially acceptable in the UK

Yes it has Baroness, and it's only going to get louder and louder and louder as the majority of British people get more and more pissed off at your co-religionist in the "religion of peace"^TM and your clamouring for special treatment, laws to protect your paedophile prophet from having nasty cartoons drawn about him, halal this and sharia the other. We are going to get more and more intolerant of you the more we discover about your antediluvian faith and its requirements and its inability to adapt and change.

In her speech, she is expected to say the description of Muslims as either moderate or extremist encourages false assumptions.

That's true enough. There's no such thing as a moderate muslim.

Baroness Warsi will say terror offences committed by a small number of Muslims should not be used to condemn all who follow Islam.

The fact that muslims are actively encouraged to hate us by their sacred texts and Saudi funded religious education brands us as immoral demons out to destroy their faith and thus leads directly to said terror offences obviously doesn't happen on Planet Warsi. Maybe she needs a little reminder of what the islamic terror manual known as the Koran actually says:

9:29 Fight against such of those who have been given the Scripture as believe not in Allah nor the last day, and forbid not that which Allah hath forbidden by His Messenger and follow not the religion of truth, until they pay the tribute readily, being brought low.

and how about

5:54 O ye who believe! take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends and protectors: They are but friends and protectors to each other. And he amongst you that turns to them (for friendship) is of them. Verily God guideth not a people unjust.

and there's plenty more where that comes from.

And just for good measure:

But she will also urge Muslim communities to be clearer about their rejection of those who resort to violent acts.

I thought we weren't supposed to differentiate between moderate and extreme mussies Warsi?

It's a chilly night. Better throw another Koran on the fire.

Did we really write software like this

2011-01-19T14:25:00.003Z

For reasons that will become clear in a later post I have had a call to download some rather old software. It didn't work at first as I needed to download an old friend, the Visual Basic 3 runtime (vbrun300.dll). My god I have not needed that file for years, I remember when we used to have to carry it round to stick on user's Windows 3.1 boxes to get the piece of crap we'd just written (which invariably was some front end to an Access database) to function.

If you were around then you probably remember VB3 applications as loads of amateurs wrote them they all looked the same: all battleship grey, a mess of MDI windows and as user friendly as a root canal operation - mind you a few "pros" wrote them like this too. This is the app I just downloaded in all its glory.

Jesus what a fucking mess!

Mind you this was probably cutting edge in 1995.

No Blacks, no Irish, no dogs

2011-01-18T18:15:00.002Z

Which, as Lenny Henry once observed "made it really difficult for a black irish wolfhound to get a room"

Which leads me to the ruling today that batshit crazy christian fundy nutjobs Hazel and Peter Bull have been giving a good shoeing to the tune of £3600 for not letting a couple of guys who were on the other bus stay at their guesthouse. Bad move Hazel, not only has this cost you a shitload of cash but looking at you and your place you could really have done with some make-over advice from a couple of gentlemen who are "good with colours".

Now personally I believe that as private individuals, with a private business, receiving no money from the state that they are fully entitled to do what they want with their property and it is no business of the state who they choose to let interact with their business and on what terms. Yes and that does include saying "No blacks, no Irish and no dogs and no pufters" if they want. That's entirely their prerogative as it is mine to call them nasty spiteful homophobes who are probably secretly turned on by the idea of bottysex.

Regrettably I'm rather torn because anything that puts the boot into the religious and makes them look like the reactionary fossils that they are makes happy steam come out of my nose but on balance I think it's wrong. I would happily, for private individuals and businesses, tear up every single bit of "equality" legislation. Don't want to hire black people, well that's up to you. Mind you if you do I'll boycott your business which won't last that long as you won't be able to hire from the full pool of talent out there and your competitors will.

But as that's not going to happen any time soon forgive me if I sit here giggling and bouncing up and down on my green scaly tail whilst the Xtians whinge and moan about "we are a persecuted minority".

Yeah sucks when the boot is on the other foot doesn't it! Hang on I'll call you a whaaaambulance.

Just a little prick, you won't feel a thing

2011-01-10T08:03:00.001Z

I was going to blog last week about the story with the BBC getting an "exclusive" about the guy who supplies a prison in the USA with the drugs they use for executions; you probably saw that one, the company being some plate-on-a-wall job at a driving school in Acton and Vince "twat" Cable getting his knickers in a bunch and doing that standard "I'm a liberal but I'm going to ban this" act.

To be honest I was sat here on my green scaly tail going "what the fuck is the story here"? A pharmacy company has supplied legal drugs to an organisation that has the appropriate licences to hold and use them; OK it's a prison and they are going to use them to execute someone but that the laws they have there and presumably the people of Arizona voted for and continue to support the death penalty*

I mean if they ordered a load of nails, a coil of rope and a bunch of 2x4's from Jewsons and then used them to build a gallows instead of a neat tree-house for the governor's kids would Twathead Vince still be throwing his toys out of the pram and calling for the export of nails to be banned? And if we're getting all squeamish about exporting the "Tools of Death"** then how come Vincey-boy is quite happy for EADS, British Aerospace and every other manufacturer or military hardware to sell their wares on the open market? I suspect maybe because of the millions of pounds those sales and the subsequent taxes on company profits brings into the treasury every year - a quick and lazy Google shows between 2000 and 2004 (on Labour's watch) that we flogged £631 million worth of sundry death-dealing kit to Africa alone - well all those duck houses and diversity outreach counsellors don't buy themselves.

But in an interesting twist this weekend some nutjob with a gun decides that he really didn't like America coming off the gold standard and not having Roosevelt around any more decides to take his disagreement with fiscal policy out on the local governor and ends up killing a couple of random bystanders including a kid (who, unfortunately for him when it comes to trial, has a cute school photo). Now this happened in, well by a big coincidence, Arizona so I'll lay odds that this guy is a shoo-in for a death sentence. And I'll also bet that more than a few politicians on this side of the pond would be quite happy with that, seeing at he attacked one of them.

But someone got to supply the drugs guys?

* Just for the record I don't; not because some utter scumbags don't deserve it just that I'm uncomfortable with the state having powers to kill its citizens

** Good name for a comedy heavy metal band that

So much for that resolution

2011-01-05T13:44:00.003Z

OK so I didn't make a blog post yesterday and I guess that means I broke my resolution on day four. It's OK, the alcohol one isn't going that great either.

In my defence however I did try and make a post on the way home from The Netherlands on the pride of Stena's fleet, the Stena Brittanica which since its upgrade to a "superferry" (which I suppose means it can leap bulk crude carriers with a single bounds) boasts "free WiFi"

Well yes and no. It did have wifi, my iPhone found it just fine and after about three minutes managed to log on but after that pretty much zip, it didn't even manage to load Google's home page. Not to worry, they have four or so computers in one of the lounges, I'll use them. Nope, same thing, only with added disgruntled fellow users complaining that it would be faster to send mail by carrier pigeon. OK so it's satellite internet and having got that installed myself I know it's pretty sucky in poor conditions but there was hardly anyone on the boat and at this point we were still very firmly roped to Holland so there's really no excuse.

OK so a bit of an inconvenience but no great drama, it's a night sailing so I'll just go to the bar, down a Heineken or two and go to bed; if I'd have been on the daytime sailing though I'd have been more than a bit miffed.

Still I'm thinking of having a moan and seeing if I can get a discount next trip.

Mind your own business.

2011-01-03T16:48:00.002Z

You might remember that back in 2001 there was a national census and for the first time it asked you what religion you were and many of us went "feck you arseholes" and wrote in "Jedi" just for the lulz.

This time around there's a campaign I think I'll be supporting. Basically you just say "None of your business" on the optional (so far) question about religion. The original census was in 1801 and was for the purpose of finding the number of men of fighting age (we were fighting Napoleon at the time) but governments of all stripes just love information about their citizens, knowledge is power. And the more they know about us, and this information extracted at the barrel of a 1000 pound fine, the more powerful they feel.

I would be tempted, sorely tempted, to write "FUCK OFF" in nice big red letters on the whole form and let them see if they could get their database to accept that. However not having 1000 quid to burn I guess I will stick to saying "None of your business" on the religion question and see how many others I can tick "Other" on or just simply "forgetting" to answer some questions.

I would urge you to do the same.

The Silver Screen

2011-01-02T14:02:00.004Z

I'm staying with friends in The Netherlands at the moment and last night we all trundled off to the movies. Now I haven't been to see a film at the cinema (or "bioscoop" as they call them here) for, well, ages. I think the last time was when the first Lord of The Rings film came out.

Now people do tell me that the "experience" is what the cinema is all about, the big screen, the sound system and the guy behind you eating a packet of crisps loudly during the quiet bits.

Well OK but I have a nice sound system at home, regrettably when it gets above "15" on the volume control the dogs start getting upset and howling and OK I can't quite do the several metres wide screen thing but then again I can see things quite adequately on my flat screen telly and probably in just as good resolution now I've got blu-ray. The seat was comfy sure enough and there was a shop where you could get popcorn (I hate popcorn) in the intermission.

So I can kind of see why people watch their movies at home these days. Mainly because I can think the good people of Hoogezand would have been a bit put out if I'd sat there sprawled out over three seats and paused the movie to go to the bog.

Oh and the film was Harry Potter 7(a). Not at all bad to be honest, just turn the brain off.

More new year resolutions

2011-01-01T14:13:00.002Z

Whilst on the subject of new year resolutions one I'm making a booze one this year. You maybe know how it is, end of the day you come home and crack open a bottle of wine to have with dinner with Mrs Dragon. You're having a nice time and oh dear wine's finished, maybe we have another little glass...

... next thing you know, and it is the next thing because it creeps up on you when you're not looking, you're drinking a bottle of wine a night, every night, and maybe a nightcap or three at the weekend. I did a little tot up the week before and I made it 75 units. Now I know the government pulled those unit limits out of their arse but even I can realise that that's a bit too much and if I keep this up my liver is going to be applying for a transfer to the ghost of George Best.

So I think a bit less wobble juice would be in order.

Dragon's new year resolution

2011-01-01T11:26:00.003Z

OK so I have been a lazy dragon and not keeping my blog up to date. Bad dragon!

So this year, 2011, I've decided that I'm going to make a blog post at least every weekday. Moreso it'll be a post of incisive wit, clever political commentary and intellectual rigour...

... ah crap. No it won't, it'll be me cursing and swearing and setting random motherfuckers on fire.

That sounds painful

2010-11-19T08:24:00.004Z

I can't say that this sounds like a very attractive prospect, especially for any ladies concerned.

And I'm really going to trust a company called "ruindive" with the care of my todger.

(Pic taken from my 419 catcher account)

The only Avatar review you will ever need

2010-11-09T08:15:00.001Z

And Avatar is shit anyway: a humourless fable about a bunch of sanctimonious, stand-offish jungle-smurfs who spend their days running around in thongs, attacking explorers, interfering with sky-horses, and obstinately halting the march of progress for the sake of a poxy tree. Watching the Na'vi (see? even their name is obnoxious) mope and moan in three dimensions simply made them more real, and therefore more objectionable. Maybe if the final half-hour had consisted of one of the human soldiers repeatedly kicking one of the Na'vi shamen in his leaf- bollocks until he spewed blue sick and his eyeballs popped out in 3D, I'd have found it easier to stomach.

Charlie Brooker, of course.

Let the witch-hunt begin

2010-10-26T06:55:00.003Z

You probably don't subscribe to the daily "Here is the City" email newsletter because if you're reading this blog odds are you don't work in the City of London¹ but pretty much everyone in The City (and the annexe down at Canary Wharf) does so it's a pretty fair bet that yesterday lunchtime when the newsletter came out there were a few ruined keyboards as they got sprayed with half eaten sandwiches in HR and up on the management floor when this little item hit the streets.

First things first, it's not from me. As I've previously mentioned I rank on the organisation chart at about the same level as the mould behind the coffee machine and this reads as if it's come from someone around mid-levels in the corporate food chain. It also reads as someone whose been "Pissed On and Passed Over" for promotion - I certainly don't recognise the part about bringing in external people rather than promoting internally, that's not what I've seen in my few years at Banko Di Haggis and I've seen plenty of people who want to climb the greasy pole be able to so.

Also there's this...

And joining the bank's full-time payroll in the coming weeks will be a number of 'conversions' - temp or contractor staff who will be given full time jobs...

... so if B di H is such a rotten place to work how come these contractors have taken the shilling and kissed the book? Much of my team is made up of contract to perm conversions (hell I'm one!) so they must have seen something worthwhile? It's not as though there are no contract jobs out there at good rates, I must get about 50 emails and a couple of phone calls a week from job pimps trying to push me to 600 - 700 quid a day gigs.

That said pretty much everything else he says seems to feel right. I've largely ignored "Northstar" and "Napier" and "WorkOut" and the "Enormous Giraffe Willy"² projects but that's only because I do my level best to ignore any kind of management initiatives that can be summed up in a single word and some sort of crappy motivational poster stuck on the wall next to our mouldy coffee machine as much as possible. But its certainly true that Northstar does seem to have been hanging around like a bad smell for quite a while.

Anyway regardless of what he said and its veracity or otherwise I think it's a fair bet that right now a thorough search to identify said anonymous disgruntled employee is probably ongoing and HR are warming up the branding irons and dusting off the rack and iron maiden. Old timers here might recall my former work blog called "That's Not a Bug Its A Feature" that bumbled along with a few dozen readers until the Sunday Times decided to make it one of their blogs of the week. Within 24 hours I was getting hit after hit from inside Banko di Haggis and even though I'd not said anything too bad about the place I dropped the blog quicker than I would drop radioactive elk shit as soon as I saw the visitor logs.

Anonymous, whoever you are good luck. If they find you and you manage to keep your job then I'll be happy to introduce you to your new peers - the mould behind the coffee machine.

¹ In fact the odds are you're someone who landed here when you were googling for "furry dragon porn" - how many times do I have to tell you we are not sodding furry!
² I think I might have imagined that one.

Sums all done

2010-10-20T06:26:00.002Z

Well so much for getting back into blogging. My excuse has been my Open University degree course with a couple of exams that needed doing, the last of which was yesterday so that's it for a while now so I can come back in here and whitter on about nothing in particular.

Anyway can you all hear that screaming noise up and down the country? Yes? Well that's the sound of thousands of useless council employees being torn from the state's teat and thrown into the street as the crushing realisation dawns on them that the real world really doesn't need a "children's play diversity co-ordinator" or a "street furniture compliance officer", hopefully one of them is that utter twat of a "refuse officer" at a certain Norfolk borough council who unilaterally decided that I now have to traipse half a mile to the main road with my binbags as they can't get the bin truck to my door because of "health and safety" of the fucking binmen!

Well quite frankly good fucking riddance to the lot of them and all those media luvvies at the Beeb who are going to get the boot as well. Anything that basically gets government pared back to the absolute essentials only is a plus in my book and making up a load of non-jobs is no way to warehouse the surplus population. After 13 years of ZaNu Labour throwing cash at anything to shore up their vote we're bust, borassic, broke and other things meaning we have no money starting with "B". However I would be neglectful in my duties as a dragon if I did not come up with a few more draconian suggestions of my own.

Overseas Aid Budget to be cut to, oh lets say £0. If people want to help out the little brown babies then there are plenty of charities out there to give money to. I don't want to help the little brown babies and I definitely do not want to assist President Mwumumumumba of Corruptionland fund new marble lavatories for his presidential palace.

TV Licence Fee. New fee is £0. The Beeb will survive, you make all those nice costume dramas that you can sell. Why should I fund a left-leaning monolithic broadcaster. Pay your own way and stop raping my wallet of 150 quid a year you bastards.

Those banks you bailed out: Sell them. See I'm prepared to take my chances as well. I noticed that shares in Banko Di Haggis are around 50p these days so UK PLC might even turn a profit.

And finally - leave the EU. Keep the money we send to these bastards and cut VAT to 0 (want to know why Darling only cut VAT to 15% - the EU rules said it couldn't be any lower as that would disadvantage the Froggies). The VAT cut will hugely stimulate the economy, get businesses flooding in here and generating jobs (and tax revenue) plus a whole layer of administrative arseholes who collect this regressive tax are now no longer needed.

Oh and Mr and Mrs Vatman? Don't think your new job is sitting on the sofa watching Jeremy Kyle. Here's a shovel and there's some sea defences that need shoring up, come on, put your backs into it.

Next Week: Fixing the incapacity benefit problem by releasing a hungry leopard into the room. Anyone who can manage to run away from the leopard does not need incapacity benefit and anyone who doesn't won't be needing any benefits any more.

Of mini-diggers and political oblivion

2010-09-27T07:14:00.000Z

Yes I know. Bad dragon, not keeping his blog up to date.

Well the last couple of weeks I've been off on leave and playing with chainsaws and mini diggers so now rather than looking like a wilderness with briars and overgrown cypress leylandii it now looks like a recreation of a battle of the Somme with chickens. Actually getting away from a computer and TV for a while was rather refreshing.

However on getting back onto the train this morning I see the monocular cunt is no longer leader of the walking corpse that is the Labour Party and we have one of the milliwatt brothers at the helm of the sinking ship. Apparently this one is the lefty one and got in on the back of block union votes. Now as someone who detests the Labour party with a passion one normally reserves for root-canal surgery I'm absolutely delighted that they elected a leftie in thrall to a bunch of union dinosaurs, you might as well have dug this guy up and made him your leader...

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/00981/96-michael-foot_981288c.jpg

... as you've just consigned the party to the political wilderness for the next 15 years.

Now all we need is Cleggeron to grow a pair, cut taxes and give us our country back. Oh yeah, I forgot, they're still politicians.

Oh yes also at some point over my vacation I spent an afternoon sat in a field in Surrey with Pink Floyd's Dave Gilmore and an eventing horse. It's a long story.

I think that closes the matter

2010-09-03T06:16:00.002Z

Stephen Hawking, the smartest man on the planet, has done lots of hard sums and says

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing," he writes. "Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.

"It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/sep/02/stephen-hawking-big-bang-creator

I believe that settles things. Case closed. All you religiots can go home now as the last "gap" your "god of the gaps" could have been hiding in isn't there any more.

Now can I have my fucking planet back from you please!

A game of numbers

2010-08-20T06:43:00.000Z

Sorry about the lack of blogging, It's been a bit crazy these last few weeks.

However to make up for it I'd like you to meet Christopher Valentine. Mad as a bucket of elves.

Well it explains why I can never find any chopsticks in my kitchen drawer when I want to eat chinese.

But I bet you laughed at the batshit crazy guy who is clearly 100% hatstand.

But if he was stood there and told you about talking snakes, people with wings who had flaming swords and this Jewish guy who came back to life after being dead for 3 days then you'd just go "oh, right, another God-botherer"

All christianity and the other "real" religions have on their side which this guy doesn't is weight of numbers . Anyone who believes in the truth of the Bible/Koran/Haynes Manual of the Invisible Pink Unicorn (PBUH) is equally as howling-at-the-moon crazy as Chris here and clearly should be on some form of medication but aren't because, well, there's millions of them and Novartis simply could not make enough anti-psychotics.

Ramadan Mubarak

2010-08-15T12:45:00.003Z

A little (NSFW) message for all my Muslim readers at Ramadan.

By the ever brilliant Grumpy Old Twat

Global Head of August

2010-07-28T06:21:00.003Z

According to my manager I have been appointed the "Global Head of August" which apparently means that as everyone else in the team appears to be taking some if not all of next month off which leaves your scaly green friend the only person with any experience with his hands on the controls.

Why is everyone off in August? Ah that would be because they all have made a lifestyle choice to have little kiddies and August is school holidays and of course as I have made the other lifestyle choice not to clutter up my existence with little ankle-biters everyone assumes that I won't want to take any holidays in the summertime.

Well thanks for consulting me guys. And also, as it was your choice to have kids, how come you get tax breaks and benefits from government and I don't?

Oi Cleggeron! How about a "Covering for you when you have to go to Tarquin and Chardonnay's school sports day / leave early because it's parents evening / must have a week in Lloret del Mar when it's sunny and you just have to put up with whatever's available in September" tax credit.

Yeah, didn't think so.

Locked in, and the religiots have stolen the keys

2010-07-20T17:00:00.002Z

Over on the BBC website today I read about this poor bastard called Tony Nickilson who, following a massive stroke and irreparable brain damage, has a body that is completely paralysed from the neck down but his higher brain functions are all fine.

Quite understandably he really doesn't want to keep on living like that but of course there's nothing he can do for himself so if he wants to die his choices are to starve himself to death or for someone to help him along. He's seeking a legal clarification that his other half won't be prosecuted for murder if, as he has clearly stated, she complies with his request to end his life.

Now in any sane, rational world this would not be a problem. Report from two or three doctors and psychiatrists into his mental and physical state and some proper oversight by a judge or similar legal figure of high standing and it would be all done and dusted. There would be, what, five, maybe ten such cases a year.

But oh no, the religious idiots, religiots as we'll call them from here on in, have to stick their oar in... let's see what the crypto god-bothering cockwallets at ProLife Alliance have to say:

“This is the most frightening attack so far on the current laws governing euthanasia in this country. As Mr Nicklinson cannot do anything himself to take his own life, this would not be a case under the law of assisted suicide but of murder... Hard cases make bad law and we simply cannot endanger the lives of thousands of vulnerable people in the interests of a tiny minority by sending out the message that it is permissible in certain circumstances to actively kill someone. A ‘right to die’ would rapidly become a ‘duty to die’ as the disabled would be made to feel that they are a burden on resources."

Look will you cunts just fuck the hell off my planet right now. This is the worst example of the slippery slope fallacy and it's the one you come out with all the fucking time. You have absolutely no evidence whatsoever about your "duty to die" assertion, none at all. It's complete bullshit and I know damned well you don't give a shit about the disabled, this is all about your angry middle eastern sky god. Proper oversight of any requests for assisted suicide by medical and legal professionals (who would naturally have to be screened to weed out any fans of Ratzi the Nazi and his paedophile protecting army of bishops) would be able to sort out the very rare cases of people leaning on granny to bump herself off before she spends their inheritance and unfortunate people like Tony would get the dignified release they so desperately want.

It's quite simple. If you want to cling onto life at all costs because you're scared of dying because of some myth invented by bronze age goat herders in Palestine then fine, you do so. But don't expect for one fucking nanosecond that your idiotic, irrational beliefs trump my right to decide what I do when I feel my life is not worth continuing.

I thank you for the lightning that shoots up and sparkles in the rain

2010-07-12T06:21:00.002Z

OK so this is my last post on temporary celebrity dead ginger nutter Raoul Moat, even though he's still a trending topic on Twitter (mainly people reposting jokes at the expense of his admittedly silly name) and, unbelievably there are over 3000 people on the "RIP Raoul Moat You Legend" page.

As London Misfit points out in the comments to the last post it appears that he was tasered during the standoff, whether by Gurning Copper or someone else I guess we will never know. I heard two different accounts of said taser incident. The first one, that they zapped him after he had shot himself, seems a bit off to me. I mean the guy had just fired a shotgun at his head - it would be pretty obvious, even to the police who sometimes aren't the sharpest chisels in the toolset - that he wasn't going to be doing anything dangerous any more so hitting him with 20,000 volts seems a bit like overkill to me.

The other question, and one I'm sure will be asked over the next few weeks, is that did they zap him unsuccessfully before he shot himself and, crucially, did that cause him to shoot himself? Now from where I sit (on the outside, making generally uninformed guesses) this seems more plausible. It was pissing down and he had a lot of thick clothes on so I imagine that a taser, which to work properly has to get the little barb things to contact the skin of the target, probably got blocked by the soggy clothes and didn't take him down as desired. I'm also wondering if said soggy clothes just conducted the electricity round his body and caused a muscle spasm whilst his finger was on the trigger and blammo, instant dead Geordie.

Only not quite so instant, as he died in hospital a couple of hours later. Now I would have thought (again, with nothing to base this on apart from it seems to make sense) that a shotgun under the chin at point blank range would, when discharged, blow your head clean off your shoulders. Maybe as well as causing him to pull the trigger the taser caused him to miss a bit.

Anyway it doesn't really matter. He's dead which means my taxes aren't going to keeping him in chokey for the rest of his life which is a good thing. If it were me in charge up there instead of Margaret Beckett and Shergar's bastard love child I'd have said "first one of you with a clear shot, drop the bastard".

However one last thought. If one whackjob with a sawn-off and six cartridges can have the resources of 10% of the entire armed constabulary thrown at it, can you imagine what would happen if 20 or 50 people were to do what Moat did at the same time as a co-ordinated attack? You could destroy a country that way. For fuck's sake nobody tell the mussies.

To the gurning copper at the Raoul Moat standoff

2010-07-10T09:05:00.003Z

Hello, yes you, the gurning copper with the taser.

Look I know you get a bit upset with people taking pictures, especially pictures of coppers, but might I give you a spot of health and safety advice. If you are going to turn your head, grimace and berate a member of the public for having the temerity to photograph you in the course of your duties it would be a really good idea if YOU TOOK YOUR FUCKING FINGER OFF THE TRIGGER OF YOUR SODDING WEAPON!

Thanks for listening.

Grumpy.

PS: Apparently former footballer and celebrity wife-beater and pisshead Paul "Gazzer" Gascoigne turned up in Rothbury last night, pissed as a newt, wanting to take his old mate "Moatie" some chicken, a warm coat and a can a lager then sit down with him and do some fishing. A local radio station managed to get an interview with him which is hilarious... go have a listen: http://ht.ly/29y6m

Anybody seen a Raoul

2010-07-09T16:15:00.002Z

You know for a ginger haired body-builder ripped to his tits on steroids he's proving rather elusive isn't he?

Mind you plod are not exactly covering themselves in glory here because despite flooding Northumbria with any copper who can be more or less trusted to hold a gun and not point it the wrong way, flying about in helicopters and apparently getting the RAF to ~~strafe anything that moves~~ fly over in a Tornado with a thermal imaging camera they seem to be sigularly unable to find him.

Of course this is leading to a few wags gently taking the piss at the competence of the Northumberland Constabulary: http://twitpic.com/23rywn

Actually in more than a few cases not that gently. In fact you don't have to dig too deep on Teh Interwebs to see a rather weird phenomenon developing - that of a psycho nutcase who has shot his ex-girlfriend and her new bloke rapidly becoming something of a folk hero.

Actually on reflection it's not that strange. Moaty-boy's stroke of genius, albeit one more by luck and paranoid delusion rather than careful thought, was to say "I'm only going after coppers" and then taking a pot shot at some unfortunate plod in a panda car to prove his point.

Now there's a considerable number of people out there who don't really like the police, nothing serious, they're not going to have ACAB¹ tattooed on their knuckles any time soon but years of state nannying, stupid laws unthinkingly enforced, random "terror" searches where you know you're being searched just so they can tick the "we don't target mussies" box, people illegally stopped by plod from taking photos and sundry other minor injustices has got quite a few people's backs up. As Raoul says we're not a target and as plod start to look more and more incompetent I can see how your average bod can sit back and almost enjoy the spectacle of the police being made to look like bungling incompetents by the most unlikely of folk heroes.

The police really haven't helped themselves by saying "Ah, we have information that he's now a threat to the general public" and then when asked what kind of threat the Police Chiefette who looks like Margaret Beckett's love child with Shergar pops onto the TV to day "Er... we're not going to tell you." You could hear the cries of "Oh yeah? Chinny rec-on" all up and down the nation.

So where is he. My guess is he's in a bar in Ireland watching the news and laughing. Or he's crawled into a hole and killed himself.

I think we should ask that octopus who can predict footy matches.

¹ Stands for "All Coppers Are Bastards"

The iPhone 4. Great "i", shame about the "phone"

2010-07-09T06:19:00.003Z

Well I've had my Jesus Phone for a couple of weeks now so I've had a chance to properly play with it and use it in the real world.

As a handheld device it's fair to say it pretty much rocks. It's fast, the piddly little keyboard which I thought would be a right nightmare actually works very well. Email and light surfing on 3G are fine and apps are quick to load and run.

However what Apple seem to have forgotten is the primary purpose of a "phone" is to, well, make and receive voice calls and at this I have to say it completely and utterly sucks. Firstly to use the device as a telephone necessitates developing the ability manual dexterity and hand positioning skills of a classical Javanese dancer in order to avoid touching the two bits of antenna in the "apple death grip". Sure you don't have to stand next to someone playing a gamelan when making a call but I can't help thinking thing might help with the hand positioning. Also the whole screen is touch sensitive, which is the point, but Apple seem to have not realised that a person's earlobe works just as well as a finger to hit the mute key during a call. Apparently the iPhone is supposed to have a proximity sensor in it to turn off the screen when it detects your bonce but it seems rather flaky unless you have the phone to your ear in just the right way so we're back to those Javanese dance techniques again... remember to extend that middle finger... here are some people making a call to their bank on their iPhone 4's to pay the gas bill:

The other thing about a mobile phone is that you would expect it to have a reasonable standby and talk time, what with it being a phone and all. Nah, not this phone. I use it as an iPod for about 3 hours a day and I'm lucky that the battery will still be reading above 20% when I get home. I almost feel as though I should be carrying around another phone juts in case I need to make a long phonecall at the end of the day. Unless you know you can definitely hook it up to some external power source at some point during the day you will not be able to make any calls on this fucker after 24 hours.

Oh and for a "it just works" device I've managed to crash mine, twice.

I tell you if I had paid more than 30 quid for this thing I would be absolutely livid.

Amen, or something

2010-07-08T06:20:00.002Z

As you probably know I have a little hobby called "scambaiting" which involves me answering those Nigerian fraud emails pretending to believe them and then messing with the scanmmer's heads. I have a seperate email account whose address has been seeded in various places from which these scammers harvest their potential victims' email addresses; what we in the trade call a "catcher account"

However this little gem turned up in the catcher account this morning.

|

Endtime Endtime
to Endtime
Re: Beloved,don't leave ur salvation to the future.Reject 666"(read-Bible-Revelation-13-8-18)
6:23 PM (12 hours ago)

To know that hell await sinners and keep silent on the matter would be injustice to mankind.eternal punishment is not a pleasant subject for discussion, but you must know it.hell the destiny of all sinners,who personly reject Christ Jesus in their life time. (read- Math-25-41-46.Rev-20-13-15,21-8.) Repent to day."Bewere of 666"-read-Revelation-13-8-18)9-Says He who has an ear,let him hear.Repent today and save ur life to Christ Jesus.

Salvation is found in no one else for there is no other name under heaven given to man,"you and I"by which we must be save.(read -Act-4-12).A great multitude that no one could count,from every nation,tribe,people and language,standing before the throne and in front of the lamb, "JESUS CHRIST." they were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands.and they cried out in a loud voice,salvation belongs to our GOD who sits on the throns and to the lamb,JESUS CHRIST.Say Aman praise and glory and wisdom and honor and power and strength be to our God for ever and ever Aman.(read- Rev-7-9-11).The wages of sin is death,but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus (read- Rom-6-23) save ur life in CHRIST JESUS to day.

And it carries on for page after page after page in the same badly spelt vein.

Doubt he's a scammer but I could not resist dropping him a quick reply:

So as the bible talks about unicorns does it mean unicorns are real? If I believe in Jesus will he let me have a unicorn when I go to heaven?

I'd like a unicorn. Unicorns are cool.

Could I have a lady unicorn as I reckon it would be really great to have sex with a unicorn and I would want a lady one because I'm not gay.

You could use the horn for leverage.

Love and kisses

Learning to love Apple, kinda

2010-06-28T06:12:00.003Z

OK so I am now the owner of Apple's latest and greatest must have gizmo, the iPhone 4. In fact I have two of the little buggers as I got Mrs Dracunculus one as well.

Now regulars will know that I'm not mad keen on Steve Job's toys (see my comments on the iPad down the page a bit) and Apple fanbois like this one deserve setting on fire, stomping on and then setting on fire again just to be sure. However a couple of weeks ago I was, much to my surprise, given an 8Gb iTouch as a "thank you" gift from my gaffer at work for all the stuff I did in Honkers which was rather nice. Now I liked my little nano iPod and just saw this as a bit of an upgrade but the more I played with it, got it all working with the wi-fi, added a few apps that I actually use including a very nice graphical calculator that does matrices and calculus the more I liked it. So much so that I thought, "this is good, all it needs is to be online all the time, kind of like a phone" and as I was thinking that Orange my mobile provider rang up and said "Hello Mr Dragon, phone upgrade time again, what would you like?" and I said "iPhone please". And then they told me if I hung on for a week I could have the nice shiny new one when it was released.

So the day after all the sad fucks had queued up for hours to get their Apple heroin the nice man from DHL brought me a couple right to my door and I didn't have to queue up for anything. Nor did I have to pay through the nose as they went onto my 30 quid a month package which has 10 hours of calls and as much text messages and internet as I can eat and they only cost me 32 quid a pop, oh and the contract period is 12 months. The advantages of Orange still thinking I'm a business I guess :-)

So what's it like. Well it's rather nice. The screen display is to die for, brilliantly clear with text incredibly crisp. Sure you would not want to read War and Peace on the thing but for a bit of light surfing it's excellent. There was a but of a brown smudge on the bottom left of the screen (which Peter Ibbotson tweeted back at me was the glue curing or the blood of one of the suicide vicitms from the Foxconn factory where they make the phone, something like that) but it seems to have gone now. Its also very quick and smooth and the pinchy, grabby, wave it in the air like you don't care user interface becomes quite natural quite quickly. I didn't seem to have a problem with the signal dissapearing either but then living in the middle of the swamps as I do I barely get a GPRS signal at the best of times so today in town is going to be the true test of that.

The downsides as far as I can tell are just the normal ones you get with any Apple product and the reasons I don't own any Mac type products. First you have to use iTunes which is just about the suckiest piece of software in the Western Spiral Arm and you can do with it only what Steve Fecking Jobs says you can. Want to add words to the spell checker... no, can't do that. Want to set your ringtone to Kraftwerk's "Computer Love" which you have loaded up... no, can't do that either. How about using it as a portable hard drive? Nope, sorry. Want to write your own little app for it... oh do sod off, look buy "iCrap" from the hideously overpriced app store, we know what's best for you, little person.

Now if I could do all those things on my piddly little Sony Ericcson i910 how come I can't on your box Steve?

Still those niggles aside, I do rather like it and it can stay. I'd say get one if you can on a good tariff where you don't have to pay that much and you're due a phone upgrade anyway but if you go and pay 600 odd quid for one you need your bumps read.

Enough with the world cup already

2010-06-16T06:22:00.001Z

Look I know there's a footy match on round at Nelson Mandela's old gaff at the moment but does every single fucking product I use have to jump on the sodding bandwagon? I mean my cornflakes at breakfast have "A feast of football" splattered all over the packaging with some bollocks about winning a shin-pad if I send in three packet tops. If I want a few pringles to nibble on when flicking through the TV channels to find something not soccer related I now have to open a packet of "Pringoooooals" and there's world-cup themed sandwiches in the staff canteen.

Honestly I am expecting to sit down on the loo only to see Wayne Fucking Rooney's gurning fizzog leering at me as it's been printed on the bog roll.

And what's got everyone's knickers in a bunch? Well everyone who gives a shit about watching the spectacle of a bunch of overpaid tossers kicking a ball about anyway. That would be the "vuvuzela" which is the Xhosa word for "wank-trumpet" apparently. I can see how folk might be a tad irritated by said "instrument" as quite by accident I caught the last 10 minutes of Rooney and his friends being held to a one-all draw by a nation to whom footy ranks around the same level of interest as competitive scrabble or morris dancing. It took a minute to work out what was wrong with the sound as all I could hear was a swarm of angry bees doing a simultaneous B-flat fart, ah - that would be your knuckle-dragging football fan embracing the "cultural diversity of the Rainbow Nation" and honking his plastic wank-trumpet. I found I wanted to ram the bloody things flare end first up their collective arses within about 90 seconds so what the hell it must be like listening to it for 90 minutes I hate to think.

And can you imagine being in the stadium itself? I read the noise level of these things is 113dB which, to give you an idea, is the peak sound pressure of my 16" chainsaw when it's at full chat. I fully expect our wandering fans to come back from SA and walk straight into the nearest hospital to get treated for deafness.

Maybe they could pick up some retro-viral drugs to handle the HIV they picked up off the local good-time girls whilst "On tour".

Gardening with rifles.

2010-06-08T06:59:00.001Z

Hello dear readers... oh hand on I just had a look at my webstats, let's make that "Hello dear reader and the rest of you who land here after typing "scaly dragon porn" into Google with your left hand because your right hand is otherwise engaged."

Bit of a blogging hiatus over the last couple of weeks as I was on holiday after the HK debacle and before that was too busy telling anyone at work what a complete and utter clusterfuck the HK operation was to get any blogging done. Anyway back now and with concrete poured, greenhouse erected, raised beds made and a whole load of other "grow it yourself" stuff done.

However I'm not entirely sure I'm going about this latest "save the planet grow your own food it tastes better and is good for you" thing that seems to be going on at the moment. Sure all those things might be true but it's so far cost me a small fucking fortune to even get going. Tomatoes, peppers and chillies all need to be grown more or less indoors so that's 180 quid for the sand, cement and gravel, 200 quid for a cement mixer (I have lots of concrete to make later on so I splurged on a new one) then 800 quid for a wood greenhouse because the aluminium ones are crap so all in with pots, compost and the all important little sticks that say what each plant is I've spent the best part of 1300 quid on this so far which would buy a hell of a lot of chillies I reckon.

Yes I know I could have done things cheaper. We did make a start with a cheapie plastic "greenhouse" which was basically thick plastic over a flimsy frame which is getting results but it (a) is dropping to bits already with one part of the "door" held together with bulldog clips after the zip broke and (b) looks dreadful.

The beds were a bit cheaper - just 80 quid for some timber and a bit of my time to screw it all together and 20 quids worth of timber treatment. We're only going to use these for stuff like lettuice and expensive veg like white onions though as living in the middle of a swamp where the predominant industry is growing things I can pick up a 25kg sack of maris pipers for under a tenner and that lasts us most of the winter so sod growing my own spuds.

Oh and the chickens... wow we get free eggs and they are much better than the shop bought ones. And the chickens themselves were cheap as we got ex battery hens so it was just a fiver each as a donation to some hen-hugging charity and they are cheap to feed. Ah but they need a house to live in - I got a plastic one as when I costed the timber to make a traditional henhouse the plastic one came in about the same price. And then living in the middle of a swamp as you do as soon as you get chickens you end up with rats.

So now I have a shiny new air rifle to deal with the rat issue. Got a reasonably priced 200 quid one from China (so now Blackpowder is not talking to me because I got a girly gun rather than a proper one) and there is something quite theraputic about sitting on your deck in the evening blasting away at the furry little bastards and at 15 metres even a crap shot like me can hardly miss and they just go "squeek" and fall over (apart from the one I had to finish off with a brick as I fluffed the headshot) but yet another expense I could have done without.

So there you are, self sufficiency and growing your own food. I would not recommend it unless you already have a very well paid job. But you do get to kill rats with a gun.

We are flying home

2010-05-18T14:08:00.004Z

Ah the sweet taste of business class lounge wine, especially when one has sweet talked the lounge dragons at Cathay's Pier into letting you into their very nice lounge and not BA's crappy little one stuffed out by the cargo sheds.

The ash seems to have dissipated and all things being equal I should be back in dear old Blighty at 5am tomorrow in time for bacon butties and a shower in the arrivals lounge.

I even managed to wangle a front upstairs berth on the plane, so first dibs at the food and not getting disturbed by people going to the bog whilst you're at 38000 feet over Kazakhstan.

Only piddly thing is I keep doing such a good job pulling their arses out of the fire whilst I'm here that the project manager, over a couple of beers between work and airport tonight practically begged me to come over for three or four weeks.

Don't know how Mrs Dracunculus will take that.... oh shit hang on she reads this blog. I'm screwed!*

*(only joking Mrs D... we'll chat when you're back from the Land of the Pharaohs.)

Ashes... all is ashes

2010-05-17T12:03:00.003Z

Better sodding not be. OK the situation is this: I need the 6pm BA flight to HKG to leave tonight as it will become the plane leaving tomorrow evening for home. Now just in case I have had the company travel people get me a backup plan which involves holding a reservation on an Air France flight to CDG in case Heathrow gets "ashed in" as it were.

But they can only hold the flight until close of business today, by which time I don't know if the planes have taken off yet.

So around midnight Hong Kong time I have to make a call to issue or cancel.

Who said international business travel was all comfy lounges and fully reclining seats.

(which is generally is by the way)

Playing with new toys

2010-05-15T14:22:00.003Z

Well I didn't mean to get one but I seem to have ended up with an iPad. Let's just say that I went into an electronics store In Kowloon to get a camcorder and came out with Apple's latest must have gismo. My logic in this is that as it isn't available in the uk just yet and as I got it effectively vat free I can try it out and sell it when I get back and maybe even make a small profit.

Present indications are that on balance I might shove it on ebay sooner rather than later. Ok so the screen display is amazingly clear and safari is a pretty decent browser and the control interface is nice and slick but, well to be honest its nothing that special. As the app store won't let me sign up as I have the temerity to live in the UK you're stuck with what is basically a clever portable web browsing tablet. The screen based keyboard is ok enough for one finger typing blog posts and email but you would not want to do any serious writing on it and at 16gig you aren't going to be storing that much on it. Basically, what we have here is an overgrown itouch that you can't load apps onto.

Now where's my proper laptop, I need to log onto ebay

Moss?

2010-05-12T14:35:00.002Z

We does not have it.

In fact it's rather a dull room really. Just another corporate hotel. However it's comfy, everything works and it has broadband (for 10 quid a day mind you, but the company is paying) and the shower is enormous.

As I mentioned earlier the hotel itself is in Kowloon, which is on the mainland opposite Hong Kong island. It's rather, different, this side of the water. Whereas HK Island is more upmarket, swanky boutiques, office skyscrapers and old colonial government buildings this side is a bit more edgy and probably the "real" Hong Kong. Slightly tatty apartment blocks, everything hemmed in, tiny streets, shops of every kind all mixed up from little tailors shops¹ and Chinese fast food joints to swanky bars, shops selling seriously high-end camera gear and a place that is basically a giant walk-in humidor selling Cuban cigars (we will be going back there on Monday for some Partagas No. 2 I think). I actually prefer it to the island side to be honest.

The only downside is the constant hassle I get as a gweilo from the touts... "Sir you want buy fake rolex", "Suit we sell cheap cheap!", "Lap dancy club sir, you come in now?", "Meester Dragon you want nice lady dragon? Wings go flap flap love you long time!"

I'm not entirely sure what the protocol is here. Do you just ignore them? Say you are not interested? Set them on fire?

I've been going for option number three so far but I just got a message from the Hong King Fire and Civil Defence people to please try the other options as they need to give their staff a break.

¹ Bespoke suits in silk/cashmere for $2200 (about 200 quid) with a spare pair of trousers thrown in ... I go to pick mine up tomorrow.

Kowloon 3am.

2010-05-11T19:15:00.002Z

Been awake for the last hour as jet-lag plays funny tricks on my sleep patterns. However it was worth it to flip the lappy on and see that Gordon the Gorgon is gone.

Ding dong the witch is dead :-)

Now let's pack him off to The Hague and have him tried for war crimes.

My bags are packed, it's time to go.

2010-05-09T17:48:00.003Z

"...'Cos I'm leaving, on a jet plane.
Because I'll be buggered if I'm going to fly all the way to China on my wings."

I'm only a little dragon.

Yes I'm off to Hong Kong again. This time courtesy of British Airways as they were 3 grand cheaper than Cathay. Currently tapping this sat in the lounge at Terminal 5 looking out over 09R which is currently in use for take-offs so I am in airplane geek heaven right now. In fact Cathay 002, my last transport to the far east, is just taxiing into position.

So far the "World's favourite airline" experience is quite acceptable. The lounge is nice, busy but not stupidly so, there's free food - I had a quite acceptable small plate of chicken tikka and now I'm in a cosy chair, slurping a very passable rioja, writing to you good people on the free wifi. You know I could get used to this!

Also due to having to fit this trip in around my holidays, other people holidays and (I swear I am not making this up) the Bhudda's Birthday I'm going to be in HK over the next weekend. I'm hoping to get some hiking done - 70% of HK is actually made up of nature reserves - and maybe go over the border into China proper for the day. However given the weather over there at the moment I'll probably end up trundling up and down Nathan Road doing some shopping and then getting piddled with the expats in Lan Chai Fong.

Anyway that's for the weekend. The current plan is:

1) Get tanked up on free booze at British Airways' expense.
2) Fall asleep on plane
3) ????
4) Profit!

PS: I'm staying in the Grand Hyatt in Kowloon which means I get to take the Star Ferry across the harbour which I think will probably make for a damned sight more interesting commute than the 7.23 to Liverpool Street.

PPS: Wonder if there will be moss?

Pony change

2010-05-04T18:20:00.003Z

So it's goodbye Pebble and say a big hello to Hazel

15.2hh worth of what looks basically like an Exmoor that's been scaled up a factor of 2.

Don't worry about Pebble... she went back to the people we originally bought her off as a part-ex on Hazel and is probably being fussed to death my little pony-mad girls and having cutesy pink ribbons tied in her mane. Of course 3 years in the Grumpy household will have had an effect and she is probably trying to eat said pony-mad girls.

Faster than a speeding bullet

2010-04-30T16:24:00.002Z

Boris leaping the NatWest Tower in a single bound... yeah I'd pay to see that.

The day the wheels came off

2010-04-28T16:57:00.004Z

Facepalm... because some thing are just too dumb for words

I haven't blogged about the election so far because, well, it's as dull as ditchwater and I'm sat here secretly hoping that they could all lose. However I did want to make a point about what's already become, rather predictably, labelled "Bigotgate". It's not that Gorgon called her "a bigot", it's what he said before that, specifically:

Well just… They should never have put me with that woman. Whose idea was that?

"That woman" was an honest old lady who had played by the rules all her life.

"That woman" worked hard in the caring professions, serving her community until her retirement.

"That woman" voted Labour because she believed they offered the best chance of progress for the working person.

And you, Gorgon, claim to lead the party of the working man? You hate the working man, in fact from your comments you seem to hate the electorate, that is the citizens of this country, full stop.

Well Gorgon, I hate you too. No really hate you with a deep, visceral hate; I merely didn't like Thatcher and her policies but you I hate.

Fuck off you evil, lying cunt. I hope you and your cronies and the once great party you lead get wiped of the political map next Thursday.¹

Guess I didn't need to get interested in football after all

2010-04-26T06:16:00.002Z

From a blog post back last year.

It would appear that the town where I was fledged1 appears to have won some sort of football competition and, apparently, gets to play with the big boys next year before presumably crashing ignominiously back into the Coca-Cola-Everest-Double-Glazing Conference League...

And today we read...

Burnley's train wreck of a season reached its inevitable conclusion today when they were condemned to relegation by a second-half drubbing from Liverpool, who kept alive their hopes of Champions League qualification by scoring four without needing to play particularly well.

So its back to being sponsored by a meat-pie making company for Burnley FC but I am wondering with my new found skills at footie prognostication I could get a job as some sort of pundit for the up-coming bore-fest of soccer that's happening in South Africa shortly. I suppose I would have to be able to say "Well basically Alan, football's a game of two halves and En-Ger-Lund have to give it 110% out there today" without wanting to set fire to a goalkeeper first.

Rule 34

2010-04-17T08:35:00.003Z

I've noticed a bit of an upswing in visitors recently. A quick look at the referrers gave the reason why and it's all down to that animated film that's out at the moment called "How to Train Your Dragon".¹

So why is this driving traffic here? Easy, people are searching for "How to Train your Dragon Porn" on Google.

So is there HTTYD porn out there? Stupid question, this is Teh Interwebs and we have Rule 34 which states "There is porn of it, no exceptions".

Here you go... NSFW and Not Safe After Lunch: Toothless being trained to do something very naughty indeed

Dunno, he is kinda cute... I might.

¹ No I haven't seen it yet. The thought of sitting in a cinema with loads of screaming kids makes me feel physically unwell, I'll wait until one of my colleagues at work gets a good rip of it.

Eyjafjallajökull

2010-04-15T16:51:00.003Z

I don't know about you but I reckon "Eyjafjallajökull" will be the title track on the next Sigur Ros album.

Is rather a shame that I wasn't flying out to Hong Kong this weekend as it would have been rather fun to call up the office there and say "Sorry, not coming because Mount Random-collection-of-letters has just exploded".

Still for anyone reading this stuck in an airport trying to get home here is some nice, soothing music by said Sigur Ros.

In case you're wondering, Sæglópur means "Lost at sea"