Thirsty

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

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...

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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