Port Au Wobble

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



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

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

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

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

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

I think I just did.




¹ OK so I paraphrased Epicurius - sue me.

Police State, we has it.

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still the wuppies like it...












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

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

I'm dickhead... fly me

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

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



... you were expecting anything different?

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

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

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

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

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

Thought not.

Happy flying.




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

Well what a year it's been in the Dragon household

I got a Christmas card off my cousin the other day, the cheapskate had sent it second class and must have posted it late so it arrived on the 29th. Anyway its the thought that counts, a thought I didn't have as I didn't send him one.

It might have ended there but on opening said jolly holly and mistletoe card out fell a letter which appears to have come from the planet Pretentious.

You know I really thought people had stopped sending those stupid round robin letters out to their extended social circle but it would appear not. What sending one of those means is "I count you as part of my extended network of vague friends and relatives but you are too unimportant in my life to keep in regular contact with so I will tell you all about my wonderful life and family once a year in a carbon copy memo I send out to a metric fuckton of people none of whom remotely give a monkey's peanut laden shite what my and my wonderful kids have been up to."

Quite correct Cousin Twathead, I think I last saw you about seven years ago when you were getting hitched to wife No. 2 in that hotel, or maybe it was wife No. 3 - I lost track.^* Anyway he appears to have aquired wife n last year, this one coming pre-sprogged for your convenience, and as a result there are a number of teenage kids to write about so I get to hear about school prom (when the fuck did we import that American nonsense - when I was a hatchling we celebrated the end of term by going down the park and drinking cider), clever Tarquina getting five A* grades in her exams and of course lots and lots and lots of lovely holidays and Cousin Twatheads' promotion at the bank.

Why? Why are you inflicting the minutae of your drab, middle class, estate car and two weeks in the South of France existence on me? It's not as though I am going to write back and congratulate you on a year's worth of achievement in all things mundane is it you fucktrumpet!

If me and Mrs Dracunculus were going to send out one of these it would look something like this:

Well what a year it's been in the Dragon household. The pony got laminitis and has been on box rest for months, we got two dogs who are eating us out of house and home and shit everywhere, my internet connection still sucks but at least I now have a more or less working WiFi setup and the garden hasn't had anything done to it and still resembles the battlefield at Ypres.

Oh and man came with a big tanker sometime in September and pumped out the septic tank.

Apart from that we spent the year gambling, screwing and getting pissed.

See you all in 2010.

^* I have a theory that my cousin is over-compensating in the wife department after the debacle of marriage No. 1 back in '94 when it turned out his bride was shagging the best man the day before the wedding and they filed for divorce immediately on returning from their honeymoon (true story - honest!)

Yawn, scratch, scratch, scratch

Look, dragons tend to go to sleep for a long time OK. I was rather hoping to stay in the land of nod until that fuck ugly twat Brown had been kicked into touch but tempted out of my cave by large quantities of turkey and stuffing I see that him and his gurning pack of fucktrumpets are still in business screwing over the country.

Sooo what's been happening. Global warming revealed as bollocks, yes saw that, lots of people going to the land of Carlsberg and Bodil Joensen (all the good porn shops are behind the station on the Istegade guys, but I expect your researchers told you that) - bet none of you cycled there did you?

Nigerian trying to blow up a plane... well I suppose that if you're too thick to make money doing 419 scams international terrorism might seem to be a reasonable career option. Seems like he was as bad a terrorist and bomb maker as he probably was a scammer "Wetin dey broda, mugu like you have no level!"

And the chinkies have killed someone for drug smuggling. Excellent! In deference to the sensibilities of the bleeding hearts in the west they didn't rip out his organs first to sell to the highest bidder on Ebay and they are letting some raghead preacher chuck him in a hole but, and all credit to them, they did say "Our house, our rules, fuck you" when Batshit Milliband went all "we condemn this is the strongest possible terms." Now I hold no brief for China or it's leadership, in fact I think China's leadership sucks like a very sucky thing and the Chinese people have some very odd notions when it comes to medicine but having been there the notices at the airports are very large and very clearly say "If you smuggle drugs we will execute you" and quite frankly the fact that you're loony tunes cuts no ice with me or the Chinese justice system. I know people with bipolar disorder (back in the day we called it manic depression), in fact one of my best mates has it - sure he's not entirely well and he's a little bit scary to be around when he's in one of his manic phases but generally the drugs keep him on an reasonably even keel and he holds down a responsible job and an active personal life with no real issues. So maybe dead drug smuggler was "Non compliant with his medication" as Mrs Dracunculus would have put it when she was dealing with loonies for a living. Well if that's the case he should have been in a hospital or institution... ah we shut all those down didn't we, right.

So Batshit, before banging on to a very important trading partner who also happens to have one of the largest standing armies in the world not to mention something of an inferiority complex about how naughty they are for stringing this guy up (bet they made his family pay for the rope too... now that's a justice system I would like to see here!) maybe you should look and see just exactly what lead him to China and why wasn't he doped up and singing his rabbit song on a "special" ward somewhere.

Mind you given that the fact he wrote said rabbit song maybe the Chinese have done us all a favour in bumping him off. Go and listen... it's truly, er, unique.

We got the crusties

You may have seen on the news that some of the trustafarian "climate change" protesters currently infesting Blackheath decided to target Banko di Haggis today:

"Protesters glued to floor of bank"

Well as your scaly green chum was there, they decided to occupy the next row of desks to where I sit, let me let you in on a few details as to how this actually went down.

Firstly, here they are should you pass them in the street and want to give them the business end of a breath weapon turned up to "toasty" so they can experience some Local Climate Change.



Nice looking bunch of layabouts filling in those long summer months before heading back to uni to that all important Media Studies degree.

Protesters have glued their hands to the floor of the Royal Bank of Scotland headquarters in the City of London.

As you can quite clearly see their hands are not glued to the floor at all, what they did was actually glue themselves to each other with one of them putting his arm around a pole supporting a TV similar to the one on the right of my picture.

Twelve Climate Camp protesters dressed as construction workers stuck themselves to the floor while a further 100 protested outside.

As you can see they are NOT dressed as construction workers, and there were in fact six of them.

To be honest they were pretty well behaved for protestors and just sat there occasionally chanting their "whose planet - our planet" chants plus another one that seemed to go to the tune of those old Jack Dee beer commercials (the "Widget, it's got a widget, a lovely widget, a widget it has got" one) and every so often one of them would start banging on to the gathered wage slaves of B de H about how bad we were and we should be nice to mummy earth and "as traders you can make a difference"

It was at this point that some kindly employee pointed out to them that, although this looked like a trading floor all the traders had moved and we were, in fact, a bunch of IT guys and beancounters.

The plod were, as you would expect with every employee of the bank wielding a pretty high end mobile phone camera, (and no it was not me that sent these images to the Daily Fail) being on their best behaviour despite one of the gobby little shits who looked not unlike Japan's bass player Mick Khan giving it a load of verbals about how the police were breaking the law by not giving their names (son, they don't need to, only their numbers) and eventually the riot act was read to them, they refused to shift until RBS stopped hurting mummy nature and some chaps with solvents turned up, put safetey goggles on the crusties and de-glued them. Of course our little protesters wanted to milk this for all they could get so despite the gig being up they insisted on being dragged out...



About two hours later one of my colleagues reported that our unwashed friends were outside the front of the building once more, no doubt having been taken down to Bishopsgate nick and then let straight out with a police caution.

To be honest I have no problem with them protesting, I disagree with what they say but they have a perfect right, indeed a duty, to say it. But you interfered with my sausage sandwich and coffee this morning so if it were down to me I'd have invoked the disaster recovery plan, cleared the floor and left you there for a couple of days - let's see how your commitment to the cause is when you're sat in your shit and are hallucinating because of dehydration.

Fucknuggets the lot of you.

(Video of one of the silly twats getting dragged out as soon as I can get YouTube to bleeding well work)

Burning down the house

Apparently a whole load of dole claiming smelly crusties are going to be decending on London today to set up a "climate camp" for, well, just for shits and giggles I guess but they will be banging on about global warming/cooling (take your pick) and no doubt teaching each other circus skills (which is always juggling and not dressing up like a clown and driving around in a car with the doors falling off) and knitting their own tofu. Apparently this is supposed to draw attention to the weather or something.

I trust that names and IDs will be being checked and anyone claiming benefits will have them immediately stopped for that week as they are clearly not available for work? No, thought not. Keep paying your taxes so these cunts can carry on inconveniencing you, you climate criminal dragon.

Meanwhile up in swamp-world we've had a bit of a fire and a nice company which does very environmentally sound work in recycling car tyres has gone up in flames and, apparently, the advice from the Environment agency is not to put the fire out and just let it burn itself out. I drove past it this morning on the way to the station and there is a mound of tyres that must be 8 or 9 metres high, 20 metres wide and dog knows how deep merrily blazing away. I can see the smoke from the lair and that's 8 miles away and every now and again the wind changes direction and you get the whiff of burning rubber, sort of like an oily coal smell like you get around steam engines which isn't entirely unpleasant but I can't imagine it's very healthy. That and the fact that this thing is probably generating the same amount of CO₂ every minute that I would have to drive my big fuck off 4x4 around the world from now until doomsday to make.

Bet you won't see any climate campers outside there any time soon.

Nyarrrrr

I see from this that the BNP have a new, sure-fire way of recruiting the critical mass they need and enabling them to usher in a new thousand year reich of not being very nice to the darkies.

The British National Party is using English Folk songs ...the BNP is very much on the look out for a "political soundtrack".

Yep. Folk music. That ought to do the job.

You can just see the rallies now. Lots of smartly turned out young men marching in perfect drill, tons of flags, Nick Griffin in a silly moustache and some weirdybeard folkie in the corner playing an accordion and singing "The Lincolnshire Poacher". Finger in the ear here we go.

Oh I'm a computer programmer
From sunny Milton Keynes
During the week I wear a suit
At the weekend I wear jeans
And it's my delight on a Friday night
To cook some haricot beans.¹

I wonder if Dave Cameron's Tories would be interested in picking up the contracts of all those "Oi!" bands now that the BNP have gone acoustic.


¹ © Alexi Sayle, who still is funny.

More pocket wolves

Loki


Freyja


Not sure what they call themselves but they certainly don't know their names. At least they are generally starting to crap on the newspaper now.

You are allow to go "awwww, cute!" for a few moments if you wish.