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Page 40The ramblings of an old gitbloggoth Mission Statement: |
Just get stuffed
Need to replace a 4ft section of flue from the central heating before winter, easily accessible area in the garage, should be straightforward.
Aaah no! Who the fuck are OFTEC? Who asked them to tell us what the diameter, maximum number of bends, lowest angle to the horizontal, minimum spacing from combustible materials, accesses for inspection and cleaning etc etc should be? Fuck your Building Regulations 2000 (SI 2000/2531) for England and Wales as amended by the Building (Amendment) Regulations 2001 (SI2001/3335). Stick it up your arse!! There are 87 pages to section J that deals with heating, are there another 25 sections of utter bollux like that? I can't see the existing system conforms at all, it has a horizontal run and a single thickness pipe hidden away inside a cupboard so it must be a hazard, the fact that it has worked well for 38 years with no sign of a fire or leakage is quite irrelevant presumably. If we had it replaced we would probably find it cost another million quid to pay for disposal of all the asbestos board in accordance with the The Control of Asbestos Regulations 2006 (Asbestos Regulations - SI 2006/2739), a 37 part document telling you how to deal with something for which there is no sound evidence of hazard whatever.
Go online to work out how to do some minor DIY job or buy the materials to do it and you are assailed by loads of FUCKING government regulations telling you can't do it yourself at all, or, if you can, you have to get it approved by the council or inspected at huge cost by some (insert stupid government department or quango here) approved tradesman. You can't even do a bit of basic electrical wiring yourself without reference to these government legitimised parasites.
Fuck me, where did today go?
One of Stephen King's short "not horror" stories, can't find it on the net, is about the way perception of time changes with age.
It really does. The sister is on holiday so after breakfast we drove down to her house to send off any orders that may have arrived for our small business. Spent what seemed a fairly short while there opening mail, checking emails and phone messages. Came back here, went for a jog, spent another short while chasing up my van warranty, had a coffee with the missus in the conservatory and, FUCK ME, it′s 6 o'clock! I could have done all that in an hour as a kid, an hour was a really long time then. A night was such a immense span of time that one never worried about tomorrow, it was too far away.
Reality never matters, it is our perceptions of it that do. The last few years of the elderly go by in a flash to them but to the younger people who care for them directly and support them via taxes it is a long time. Here is a great solution to current concerns about an ageing population. Invent a drug that shortens the lifespan but resets the perception of time back to what it was when we were children. When we at bloggoth are 75 we would happily take a drug that knocks us off in 5 years if it seems to us that we have lived for another 20.
Quite agree. No hang on.
Women are very much the better half of "man"kind. Kinder, less violent, less criminal, more pragmatic, less selfish, less self seeking and less prone to irrational idealism. So we are inclined to agree with the idea that women should always be represented at the highest positions in any political group.
As this lady says here. Oh, wait, hang on, Harriet Harman said it? That stupid lefty nutty feminist cow? Must be bollox in that case. We take back all we said earlier. A woman's place is in the home.
Oi! Missus bloggoth! Where's my tea?
Topic: Quite agree. No hang on Comment here. Comments so far: 0
A plague of zombies - how ridiculous. Or is it?
A couple of weeks ago we had an entertaining bit of news about Leicester council's admission, in response to an FOI request, that it had no plans to deal with a zombie attack. The council were obviously quite right not to spend money on a contingency plan to deal with something that could never happen.
Or so we thought at the time. Now we are not so sure after reading this item about the drug Krokodil that rots the tissues; there's some rather disgusting pictures here. These idiots seek their highs knowing full well what the consequences are. Driven by an irrational hunger and rotting. Pretty much the definition of a zombie.
Look at the way that diseases and parasites work. Such organisms never kill the host immediately as they would be destroying their own habitat and source of food; at the very least they need to allow a host enough time to transmit the disease to others of its kind. Sometimes a parasite will make use of its host in other ways, this recent news item about a parasitic wasp that turns a Ladybird into a zombie bodyguard is rather appropriate to the discussion.
Put these news items together. Is it beyond the bounds of possibility that a bacterium or other parasite of man would evolve a strategy that would guarantee the spread of its own species - a disease that gave humans a major high so that some people would be rushing to catch it? How effective would any cure be then? If the high is good enough it may not matter if the disease causes the flesh to rot as that prospect doesn't seem to deter the Krokodil addicts.
An ever growing hoarde of rotting people, wandering about totally out of their minds. Maybe Leicester should review its plans for a zombie attack.
Hate is like a dead, dead rose
Love songs. Bah! Smaltzy crap most of the time. Why are there so few decent hate songs? The only one I can think of is a leftist (surprise!) folk song that sings about sticking razor blades under the finger nails of the rich. Now it seems that nobody at football matches, in Scotland anyway, will be allowed to sing about what a stinking bunch of Catholic/Proddie wankers the other lot are. "It's political correctness gone mad" we cry!
Seriously, it's hard for anyone outside Scotland to see what this conflict is actually about. It isn't as though the two have vastly different views about the future direction of Scottish society or as if one is controlling the economy and excluding the other. When hostility is quite so historic in nature and there are so few fundamental differences today it may make sense to merely tackle the symptoms, the outward show of hostility, because that is all there really is. Name calling and violence begets name calling and violence.
Unfortunately, laws like this are a blunt instrument. Our legislators deploy them unthinkingly regardless of why the tensions exist and they can be counter productive unless the root causes are tackled. Legitimate concerns over the huge scale of immigration, the failure to control the quality of the migrants and the unpleasant realities of political Islam have to be listened to and acted upon before we get any more "hate laws".
Only when rational concerns have been addressed does it make sense to concentrate on the irrational ones.
Another ignored fact about immigration
Watch any program on immigration to Europe, legal or otherwise, and one thing stands out; they are mostly young men. This in itself is not a good thing. According to The Guardian "Historically, societies in which men substantially outnumber women are not nice places to live" and "large parts of the world could become like America's wild west, with excess testosterone leading to raised levels of crime and violence"
Indeed. Take a look at the statistics for our own society for almost any crime you can think of and men greatly outnumber women. Young men in isolated groups with no moderating female or family influence are an even greater problem. Add in attitudes and views over a range of issues that are at odds with our own, about what is a serious crime for example. Is it any wonder that Chinese immigrants figure so prominently in sales of counterfeit goods when you look at China's relaxed approach to copyright infringement? Add the frustrations of young single males to backward attitudes to women and is it any wonder that most Rapes in Oslo are by non Europeans?.
A final problem is that young male migrants are the hardest hit when the economy slows. If jobs are scarce it is quite reasonable that they should first go to a country's own citizens and, as temporary staff admitted to plug a short term shortage, migrants should return home. They were paid for the work they did and we have no further duties towards them. Of course they do not because of our lax residency laws and our generous benefit system. Low incomes and the resulting resentment leads to an escalation of crime.
Do the supposed benefits of cheap labour during good times even begin to compensate for these problems? Not on your life!
June Tabor - The Band Played Waltzing Matilida
Atheism is a dead sparrow
Found another little creature that had flown into the window. It was still warm and sometimes they recover, so wrapped it up in some old socks in the shed but an hour later it was stiff and cold. So how did this little death differ so radically from our own? Some might say that we would be mourned whereas this little bird's relatives and companions will probably not notice he is gone.
They would probably be wrong on that. It is well known that intelligent animals like apes, elephants and dophins mourn but as this says the behaviour has been observed in llamas, wolves, foxes and magpies. As a boy we used to keep rabbits and guinea pigs and towards the end, after we decided to stop keeping them, we had just one of each left. The two were inseparable and when the guinea pig died the rabbit went into a total depression; it didn't groom itself, it stopped eating and in the end my brother in law used a hammer to put it out of its misery. When one of my mother's cagebirds died (forgot what they were) the other never recovered, just kept hopping from perch to perch calling.
The point is that although there may be a wide gulf between the intelligence and emotions of humans and animals, the difference is only one of degree and not of kind and this observable fact does not square with the idea that god created only man in his image while the rest of the world, including animals, was created merely as a backdrop to support our existence. Barking religious groups, the Muslims and Evangelical Christians, hate the theory of evolution because it says that man is not fundamentally different from other animals, that the gap we see now came about because groups evolved at different speeds and in different directions and intermediate groups died out.
It is probable that out there tonight some little sparrows are huddling down with a sense of loss and wondering where their relative or companion is. It doesn't really matter how dim that sense of loss may be or how brief it is, the fact that it exists at all is another proof that our organised religions are total bollox.
That figures
The Mad Messiah claims to read the Koran everyday. Not just to see what he has to deal with in his role as Middle East envoy either, he has apparently praised the Muslim faith as being beautiful and called Mohammed an enormously civilizing force.
This utter nonsense is no surprise coming from a profoundly irrational man. More than anyone else, with the obvious exception of the dimwit Bush, he is the one who has fanned the flames of militant Islam. Most Islamists, like most ordinary people with their own lives to lead, are more focused on what happens in their own backyards than on some global Jihad and there is no evidence that the Taliban had the inclination or the resources to wage one. The response to 9/11 should have been far more strictly focused on the terrorists but instead Bush/Blair started invasions that have killed tens of thousands of people and removed Saddam Hussein, one of the best buffers we had against a real Islamist threat, Iran. Osama must be laughing in his grave at the success of his plot. In the past Blair has said some sensible things about the nature of the Islamic threat. Is he schizophrenic? Or does he seriously believe this rubbish about a tolerant faith that has been hijacked by a few extremists?
Or does he suffer from Theoretical Islam Illusion Syndrome? Those with this illness consider that the creed is defined by principles, not practice. They convince themselves that sacred texts and obscure scholarly teachings are enlightened, so therefore any aspect of the faith that is not in accord with those principles is not part of the faith at all. Ranting Imams are just extremists no matter how common they are, regimes imposing harsh Shariah laws are just nasty dictators. Sufferers are convinced that to prove their cases they just need to provide an enlightened interpretation of some obscure bit of text, quote some moderate Imam or reference some highly selective version of history in Moorish Spain. The realities of Islam today, as implemented in the laws of the Islamic nations and as practiced by many of its adherents, are disregarded.
The top comment here illustrates the symptoms of this strange condition. When considering why Saudi Arabia has a low rape rate, rational people might think that this is connected to these facts: *Note 1
- The law which puts a woman's testimony as equal to half that of a man's, making rape extremely hard to prove.
- The law that means she will usually be prosecuted for putting herself in a position to be raped even if she does prove it.
- The fact that women have so little freedom that the circumstances for stranger or date rape will hardly ever occur. *Note 2
But no! These facts about Saudi law and society are totally ignored in the comment and an unsubstantiated generalisation about the death penalty for rape (irrelevant anyway if a women cannot dare to make an allegation and cannot prove it if she did) and a quote of some Muslim scholars in Wikipedia are proofs of the superiority of Islam.
How even a lunatic like Blair can find the Qu'ran "Immensely Instructive" we have no idea although as with all sacred text (AKA bollux) there are different ways of interpreting it. It is true there are different versions of the Haddiths, in one the prophet has adulterers stoned, in another he merely advises separation from a cuckolding spouse. Text, smext. Does it really matter which version is "correct" or what a passage is supposed to mean? The only sane way to judge any creed is by how it is actually implemented. The reality of laws and attitudes in most Islamic countries on issues like participation by non Muslims, rights for women, individual freedoms and penal law, varies from the oppressive to the barbaric.
Note 1:
As reported by the US State Department, see
section on Women about 3/4 down. The USSD also says there that rape against women and boys was a serious problem.
Note 2: Spousal rape is not a crime in Saudi Arabia. It rarely is in the Muslim world.
Allman Brothers - Jessica
The Top Gear theme tune, think this is called Southern Rock. Brill stuff. They also did Rambling Man, Midnight Rider and a few other familiar blues/rock things.
The Hum and other noises
Strange occurences are often reported. Usually there are rational explanations, sometimes they are imagination or invention but the hum as reported in this village, is not so readily explained. Assuming it is the same phenomenum as the famous Bristol hum, the sound is as real as the sound of the bloggoth keyboard as we type this. It was around in the mid to late 60s when we were there and you couldn't miss it. When we first heard it, we thought it was just the background noise of traffic in the city but unlike traffic the noise was still exactly the same at 3AM.
Happens in our house too and has done for years. Every time we go to bed it starts pouring with rain outside. It isn't loud or intrusive, it just sounds like heavy rain would through double glazed windows. That particular sound is only at that one spot in the house and we don't hear it anywhere else. In one corner of another bedroom there is also a constant low hum that you can't hear anywhere else in the room. These sounds do not disappear if there's a power cut or if the water is turned off, I've tried it.
One of the comments on that link talks of very low frequency sound that is entirely inaudible until it strikes an object and is amplified by the shape of the room. Maybe it's just a mundane transmission from the brickworks down the road but it's odd the way it goes unnoticed through walls and rooms and manifests itself only in small places extending just a foot or two in any direction.
Boring too. We prefer to think it must be a demon cleaning its teeth.
PS Or maybe we just drink too much coffee
No comment
Today Tower Hamlets. Tomorrow?
The article speaks for itself. One comment is worth quoting:
I keep being told that I must regard the EDL as a mirror image of Al Qaeda. That is starting to seem like being told to regard the French resistance as the mirror image of the Wehrmacht.
Sound thinking always crosses over into idiocy
Given the too frequent reports of grooming, both on and offline, parents should rightly be concerned about the sexualisation of young girls but, as with the related issue of objectification of women, the argument ignores realities and is taken too far.
In a society where size, strength and fighting ability are not the most important attributes it is right that women should expect to play an equal role but that does not mean that we should deny the basic instincts nature has given us for survival of our species. It is still perfectly normal for both sexes to try and attract mates. Similarly, adult role playing by chldren seems pretty normal. Small girls using makeup is hardly anything new and what is playing with dolls if not a rehearsal of a future sexual role? One is reluctant to search the net using keywords like sex and young children but if one did there will probably be some serious studies indicating that such rehearsals for adulthood by both sexes are perfectly natural.
Germaine Greer received a lot of flack for saying that young girls were learning to flirt from a young age but she is probably right. In our limited experience a few can be very flirtatious with complete strangers and that needs to be controlled given the prevalence of some who may choose to read too much into it. However, these things are probably natural and, at home and among friends of their own age, probably harmless.
Is Internet Explorer 9 a model of human progress?
Downloaded Internet Explorer 9. Can't see any differences except that things are in different places. The Favourites are now at right instead of left and warnings about popups etc are at bottom instead of top. How many man months did that take just to annoy we at bloggoth? We hate things being moved about!
The problem with most "progress" is the endless fannying about learning new ways of using what appears, for most users anyway, to be exactly the same thing with a different look and different ways of doing things. Real advances can be tolerated but just fannying about with things for no bleeding reason whatever gets up our nose. It took ages to get used to the wierd arrangements of the menu in Office 2007 but if it is does anything that 2003 did not we have never discovered what it is. Mostly this was just a technical change to use of zipped XML in pursuit of some world standard, probably designed to allow HMRC and other giant lizards to control the world.
The worst of it is that those of us who write software end up having to continually modify things that work perfectly well to "stay abreast". A professional review of our software said it worked well but was rather old fashioned. Indeed. It has a standard menu at the top and to open a different view you click on the word View, pardon us for not having a shiny 3D looking button that does exactly the same thing. Our windows work extremely well, allowing all the usual arrangements and autoresizing to preserve scale even when dragged over multiple monitors but pardon us if they do not have ridiculous "skins" that make them look like a space station, a Hadron Collider, a Dalek or some other such bollux.
We seem to be creating a society where nothing matters except appearance and change for its own sake and unfortunately this tendency is not confined to sofware.
Bah
Went with the missus bloggoth to South of England Show. V. disappointing this year, lot of stalls with plants and shoes and jumpers and other boring stuff - we like silly gadgets but saw no silly gadget stalls at all.
Never mind that xoggoth! cry the non existent readers; we want to see this year's photos of sows' bottoms. Well, sorry NE readers, but we don't have any. Must be a different breed, because all the sow's bumholes looked ghastly and lumpy this year. The only pig picture we took was this shot of some cute piglets napping.
PS NE readers wanting to see the REAL pictures of underage pigs, nudge, nudge, wink, wink, should send a cheque for £150 ($245,802,508) to the usual address. Don't tell anyone we mentioned it.
Visions of the future
Usually rubbish except when we at bloggoth have them. Not that some sort of spiritual guff is involved, it is just that we are so brilliant our mind can correlate billions of facts in an instant and process them mathematically to arrive at probable events.
Today there is news of an in-bin camera to check what rubbish someone is throwing away. We predicted this on bloggoth almost four years ago.
Conspiracy theories, pah! But one has to wonder this time
Conspiracy theories about Dominique-Strauss-Kahn's arrest abound. It may all be a plot by Sarkozy, in alliance with Vladimar Putin, to stop him running in the presidential election. Most Frenchmen seem to blame the Yanks although not sure why.
The net says that Dominique-Strauss-Kahn is 62 but he looks a lot older, he's not well preserved certainly. Us 60 something year olds are not normally past it but one has to say that shagging is not so high up on the agenda as it used to be and one's urges are less likely to to override common sense than a few years ago. A bloke in his job and with a serious prospect of becoming the next French president would surely have a lot of sense and must have realised he had a lot to lose by molesting a maid. He appears to be a bit of a randy old git but someone with his money surely could have hired a host of high class tarts. These common sense reasons suggest there is something a bit strange about this case. Did Sarkozy/Putin/whoever actually do such a thing? Who knows? Would they or any other of our glorious leaders be capable of it? You bet.
Anyone who thinks our governments always act honestly in the interests of the people makes someone who believes the world is run by giant lizards look rational.
Bastards
If there was any justice in the world it would be our governments and tax authorities facing years in jail or, preferably, torture and execution for wasting our time and our money. I expect the main reason that bloggoth hero Wesley Snipes did not file tax returns is because the shitty tax filing systems did not work. Fighting hordes of vampires is easy compared to filling in an online CT600 or whatever the Yank equivalent is.
Yet...
...another never mentioned downside of immigration, typified by this Sikh rally in London over a 1984 India temple attack is the way that we are constantly picking up the bill for rallies and demonstrations by migrants and minorities over issues that have FUCK ALL to do with Britain and are of no interest to most of the indigenous British. Tamils, Libya, Gaza, Burma, Muslim protests about Danish cartoons, US Koran descration and French veil banning. Those are just the bigger ones. How much does it cost in terms of police time and disruption for our capital?
Why not go back to India, Sri Lanka, Libya, Gaza, Burma or whatever and protest there? In some cases you would get imprisoned or shot but we would certainly admire your principled defence of your beliefs, more principled than taking the usual easy option at the expense of others who owe you nothing.
Britain and the West generally are too darn tolerant and, over and over again, our tolerance is taken advantage of.
Illogical and inconsistent
Some Christians have taken cases of discrimation and "discrimination" to the European court. The pair disciplined for wearing crucifixs at work have a point. Nobody is allowed to sack Sikhs for wearing turbans or Muslims for wearing veils or beards, so why should Christians be sacked for wearing such an unobtrusive emblem?
The other cases are not the same. These people refused to do the job they were being paid to do and anyone who does that, whether Christians refusing to conduct homosexual civil partnership ceremonies or Muslims refusing to sell alcohol, has no right to insist on staying in the job. If these sensibilities can be accomodated without significant impact on the employers or others, fine, but they should have no right to insist upon it. As we have said before, people should make sacrifices for their beliefs, not expect others to.
There is an illogical inconsistency in these cases too. These people are claiming discrimination because they are not being allowed to discriminate against others. Say a church applied for planning permission for a church hall and an atheist clerk refused to help because he objected to Christianity. Would that be ok? One assumes so.
Topic: Illogical and inconsistent Comment here. Comments so far: 0
St Elmo's Fire
Needs a bloggoth lyricy thing, just as well the brilliant bloggoth lyricy tool now does most of the work.
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The continuing incompetence, or worse, of our public authorities
In an effort to avoid more frustrating days retyping accounts stuff, probably more than once given all the bugs in HMRC's crappy systems, we at bloggoth have been attempting to make our own iXBRL accounts/computations sheets that populate automatically from our Excel sheets. This should be simple as IXBRL is just strict HTML, with certain fields like gross turnover marked up in XBRL.
Just discovering the basics of the XBRL format is a major effort given all the guff on the net, either commercial software sites trying to flog their overpriced solutions or accountants woffling about generalities. It's like trying to use a programming language where everyone is being totally secret about the syntax details and any examples are very well hidden. There is one on the Companies House site but you would not know it as it is hidden away in a subdirectory of a zip file called Companies House Taxonomy which you cannot unzip because the file names are too long for Windows and the index just shows a blank page. This is typical establishment crap. Will the validator work any better? Probably not.
Why are our authorities so technically incompetent? Or is there more to it than that? For quite a while HMRC have been supplying technical data about their iXBRL requirements to many accounting software companies, including emails of actual examples of working pages which have not been published for the rest of us. All they make publicly available is very vague guidance that requires you to cross match with rheams of other vague stuff before you can get even an inkling of what is needed. One of HMRC's documents even references an article on Wikipedia! Another says you can get a free taxonomy reader by Googling but the only free ones require input of full details including email and phone number before you can download them.
We have noted before the way that the US Government seems so so much more helpful to its citizens, making information freely available and copyright free while ours rips you off, providing nothing useful unless you pay for it or jump through hoops. Sometimes, as with this iXBRL thing, it seems only to be serving the commercial sector. The producers of accounting software are doubtless rubbing their hands in glee that many more small businesses will be forced to buy their expensive programs rather than use Excel/Word and the accountants ditto as they can charge extra for all the supposed increased complexity.
We repeat. Producing basic small business accounts in IXBRL should be simple if the government would provide the basic information that it seems to have provided freely to commercial interests. Are there some background deals and payoffs going on here?
PS And next year the long suffering SME will get hit by another mass of complexity when we have to switch to the international accounting standard. What will they dream up the following year to fuck us over with?
Bringing back an old idea
Much as we at bloggoth generally like NICE little animals, there are a few that piss us off. Stinking cats obviously, but now also Jackdaws.
There has been an explosion of these things in the woods behind the house and in the last year or so they have suddenly started invading the gardens en masse. You put out seed and the bird table is instantly invaded by a horde of the squawking buggers who gobble all the seed in about 10 minutes. Mesh would would look pretty ugly and exclude the other large birds like pheasants and pidgeons. We found an online solution that looked really stupid but it worked! A big black woolly hat hanging from the tree stopped the invasion although it seemed to frighten the other birds too. However, take away the hat and the other birds come back quickly while the Jackdaws still stayed away for most of the day.
Apparently they think it is a dead crow and also have pretty good memories for danger. It does make you wonder if we were a bit overzealous in abandoning some of the visual deterrents to human crime that they had in the middle ages although a hat might not do as a petty criminal is probably slightly more intelligent than a crow.
Another illustration of the daftness of immigration
It is often pointed out how ridiculous the PC claims of the benefits of large scale immigration are. The studies are never honest about the true nature of many new or former migrants even when that nature is revealed by reputable sources like the ONS and they never take proper account of the many extra costs and negative impacts on our society.
Nothing illustrates the way realities are ignored more than the problems at the Southern Cross care homes. We are continually told that we need migrants to help pay for care of an increasing number of elderly but one of the major elements in that care bill (even when there has not been asset stripping as in that case) is the high cost of property and that cost is beng pushed up by immigration.
Quite how some major migrant groups which have much poorer health, higher levels of unemployment and crime and greater need for welfare and social housing than average will pay for their own future care, let alone anyone else's, is another question that should be asked.
The Valley Road
Bit of rock always cheers us up, even after an HMRC infested day.
Think this one's about promiscuity and furtive abortion but that's me. I recall when I was five, in my first year at primary school, we were doing Jack and Jill went up the hill and I put my hand up and asked miss if it was a tale of promiscuity and furtive abortion. It seems not. Jill was a transvestite pre-op.
PS Google is getting creepy with its tracking of our searches. Looking up the lyrics for above and right at the top of the page an ad for iXBRL software for tax returns. I'm trying to unwind you bastards!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I bet it knows what I had for tea too.
*%?$*£@! time wasting useless bastards!
Thought I would get my CT600 corporation tax return in this morning. Company has not traded significantly so should have been dead easy. Nope! As usual f*cking HMRC have been hard at work making things more complex and screwing things up further through their shear incompetence.
Unable to download using IE8 for 2 days (probably not many people use a Microsoft browser) and had to switch to using Chrome. Usual annoying little faults like error messages showing up when you click the help icons, glad to see they haven't spoiled any of last year's exciting problems by fixing them. Then at end, although nobody has bothered to revise the text and it said you could submit accounts and calculations as pdf files, it actually didn't let you. You had to go back and type all the profit and loss, balance sheets, accounts notes, capital allowances and CT calculations in by hand, stuff that last year you could just print to PDF files from your spreadsheets. Then it refused to submit, giving an incomprehensible error about departmental specific business logic in the body tag. Phone support, 10 minutes going through options and sub options of the options and listening to long winded messages, wait another 10 minutes for some stupid cunt to answer the phone, only to be told it was a fault that could only be fixed by downloading the file again and starting over. The phone line turned pretty blue. Insisted on talking to a superior only to be given the same crap.
Oh, but let's be fair here, there was one improvement. You can use the accounts service output for submission to Companies House too, that should save time shouldn't it? Just one problem, you fucking morons! Accounts to Companies House have to be sent in 3 months earlier. Still, IF YOU HAVE A FUCKING TIME MACHINE, there's a distinct saving to be made here. Hell, submission to both could only take 2 hours more than 3 years ago when CH and HMRC both had simple HTML form based systems that actually worked! IF I DID HAVE A FUCKING TIME MACHINE, I'd probably pop back and use those.
We at bloggoth used to work in IT in aircraft control software. Just as well the companies I worked at did not have the same approach to testing their systems as HMRC or the UK would be a smoking ruin by now.
Not guilty
Sexy
There's a new website that invites you to rate sexiness of MPs. My MP Mr Nicholas Soames is 624 out of 648 on there. I can't think why. Just one ahead of the gorgeous Margaret Becket!
It's no good, having looked at those two, I just have to pop into the bog for a wank.
And back to the normal sort of bollux
NICE little creatures. We tend to think of house spiders as one species but if you are interested enough to look at them properly, they are not.
Here is an Office Wall Spider, the one I think most people think of as a House Spider.
Here is a Garage Shelf Spider. It's a bit blurred because the camera focused on the bit of wood but it is clearly a very different species.
This is a Conservatory Spider.
Again very different. Look at the sleek racy lines, this is one seriously sexy spider.
The last is a Downstairs Bog Spider.
We occasionally get these in the operating theatre style white tiled, shiny cabineted upstairs bathroom.
What they find to eat there I have no idea. Perhaps they just bask in missus bloggoth's extravagance.
TIME FOR A RANT! says Zebedee
Silence, silence and more silence
The Sun reports that one in seven of people accused of murder and rape in the UK are foreigners and it is up to a third in some areas.
Ah well, it's only The Sun (Star/Mail/whatever) some will say, as if that is an argument. Have The Sun made it up? Of course not, they would never get away with it; this was from freedom of information requests. Look at the prison stats from the ONS, the police reports, the most wanted in many areas, the BBC's Crimewatch. Are the BBC racist? Figures for former migrants among some BME groups are no better.
Then look at the reports from Interpol, the WHO, the US State Department, charities, aid agencies etc. These migrant crimes are not products of marginalisation in the UK but of the practices and beliefs they bring with them. High levels of drug crime, absentee fathers and school drop outs from Jamaica, vicious gang conflicts from Somalia and Tamil areas of Sri Lanka, drug crime from Turkey, people trafficing and slavery from Eastern Europe and Africa, counterfeiting and protection rackets from China, violent views on gays from Jamaica and Africa, awful attitudes to women and contempt for non Muslims from several Muslim countries, fraud and belief in witchcraft and Creationism from Africa, skunk cannabis growing from Vietnam. Then there's the high dependence on benefits and social housing and the huge health costs including those of infectious diseases like HIV, hepatitis and TB. Again, the figures are all to be found in the ONS, hospital/university studies and other reputable sources.
One should not ask why The Sun has published this data but rather why other papers have not. This is significant evidence that should be taken into consideration by our government in its handling of immigration. Only after that has been controlled to the fullest extent possible is there a case for silence in order to improve the prospects of former migrants who are now British citizens. You cannot have a debate when only half the argument is permitted and the valid arguments against large scale immigration of the uneducated and low skilled from third world, chaotic, high crime or Islamic societies are numerous and convincing.
There should not be this silence on the issue - are the citizens of the UK and Europe really so unimportant that they do not deserve to be protected? Naturally the silence will go on.
And yet more silence?
Is there another one in the making about the German E Coli outbreak? We do not know the cause and the suggestion may be quite unjustified but an article on a previous serious outbreak in Europe has this comment:
Another big factor is that the majority of farm workers are immigrants who have had very little if any training with regards to hygiene and food safety.
And according to this:
European Union officials have said the cucumbers could have been contaminated at any point along the route from Spain to Germany.
Could "along the route" be taken literally?. What exactly are the health implications for us all of illegal immigrants smuggling themselves into Europe, spending many hours, sometimes days, in lorries carrying all sorts of cargo including food? What happens to such cargo? What precautions are taken to disinfect those lorries before they are used again? Perhaps we should be told.
Talking of Haiti
Tombstones must get very complicated in a country with lots of zombies.
Yes, terrible, yawn
This week in the uninteresting news we have seen that Sep Blatter, the head of FIFA, has been acquitted of shooting a few thousand Bosnian Muslim youths who refused to vote for him as FIFA president. News is not so good for FIFA committee member Jack Warner, who seems to have got a lot darker than he was when he played Dixon of Dock Green back in the 60s. Possibly the poor old chap has Addisons disease but he looks pretty good for his age. The president of the Asian Football Confederation, Osama Bin Laden, is also facing allegations and has withdrawn his bid to be chairman.
We seem to recall something about tickets or TV rights in Haiti as well but the non existent readers will have to look that up for themselves, we can't be expected to do everything.
The reality
Is this video a right wing fake? Pretty sure it isn't. Norwegian TV report on a police report from Oslo. 83 out of 86 rapes in Oslo over 5 years are by men of non western origin. Every single rape in the past year was by non western men. Unless the term includes Poles, non western here appears to mean predominantly Pakistani, Iraqi and Somali. This video (also not a fake) refers to Kurdish or African men and men with "a completely other view on women".
Just how much longer is the pretence about the awful nature of far too many third world, especially Muslim, immigrants to Europe going to go on?
Nuts
Ken Clarke's comments about rape are still in the news.
He does not say a lot that is sensible but his much criticised suggestion that some rapes are worse than others is no more than a totally obvious truth. Are people really suggesting that a lover poking it in when she has said she is not in the mood is the same as a violent prolonged gang rape followed by burning with caustic soda of a 16 year old with a mental age of 8?
Gang rape? What were we thinking? We do apologise. We meant to say group rape as gang rape has become "racially charged". Oh no, hang on, we should have said "sexualised bullying" to make it clear that rape "seems to be an extension of other sorts of bullying behaviour which is being committed by young people".
There you are Ken, it's ok to downplay the seriousness of rape when it serves a politically correct pretence.
PS Just as long as you don't refer to realities as here and here. We certainly wouldn't.
Brilliant comment with no effort
Two things we were going to rant about, one was the scapegoating of Sharon Shoesmith by that shitscum Ed Balls and the news of yet another example of Sikh militancy.
Fortunately,
Old Holborn and
Cranmer have said most of it for me. Well done chaps me.
Story
Recent fannying about with a CCTV inspired this one.
What you see may be what you get
Sensory discrimination
We have five senses so why is it that modern life mainly depends on only two of them? We rely on sight most of all, hearing (unless sight impaired) second, touch (unless both sight and hearing impaired) a distant third. Smell and taste have only a trivial importance except to improve the experience of eating or to avoid stepping in dog poo. Is this not a waste of the senses nature (or god if you believe in that bollux) has given us? Our ancestors did not waste their abilities in this way and scent would probably have played an important part in tracking down a mammoth.
It is a known fact that emission of pheromones and other secretions is related to our mood so that fear or the sexual attraction we feel for others can all be picked up subconsciously by others using the sense of smell. Similarly, the way we feel is influnced by our thoughts, and our feelings in turn all have real consequences for our physiology. Physical symptoms such as heart rate, nausea, yawning, bowel movements, even long term health problems can all be triggered or affected by mental factors like stress and all these physical consequences in turn have consequences for the chemicals we secrete.
We at bloggoth have been researching all these interactions and developing sensitive devices linked to sophisticated analysis software to make use of them. The first such device to go commercial is the xoggoth underpants/knickers analyser. Just run the patented pants sniffing device over a pair of your partner's dirty discarded smalls and in seconds the built in mini screen will provide a detailed report of what he/she really thinks of you. Underpant secretions cannot lie and our reports are typically better than 90% accurate. If there is a good skidmark to boost the input data density, up to 99% accuracy can be acheived.
The xoggoth underpants/knickers analyser costs only £1499.99 ($25,635, 15,936,764 cents, 36,001,888,8889 nickels, 8,977,464,834 quarters or 4,199,428,942,904,940,044 dimes). Send orders to xoggoth Towers.
Sanity from other Yanks anyway
The US supreme court has upheld an Arizona law allowing the state to shut down businesses that hire illegal immigrants.
Oh for a similar law in the UK. The major cause of illegal immigrants is legal immigrants and it is not solely because the illegals naturally want to live among their own kind or because they are less likely to be noticed but because it is overwhelmingly those of their own ethnic origin among UK citizens who assist them. In the vast majority of cases, when a large number of illegals are caught on one premises or working for one business, the owners are of the same ethnicity.
Fines are appropriate for somebody who exercises insufficient care in checking credentials in the odd case but the severest penalties for deliberate employment of multiple illegals need to applied much more regularly. It is a criminal offence, punishable by prison sentence of up to 2 years, to knowlingly employ an illegal worker, so how is that in every case one reads of in the news or sees on "UK Border Force", business owners employing several illegal workers in their restaurants or other businesses only ever seem to get fined?
The average £5,000 fine is hardly a penalty when the owner can save that and more by not paying a proper wage, not paying tax or national insurance and being free of all the paperwork and rules that the government loads onto legal employment. One doubts that illegal workers can insist on sick pay or six month's paid paternity leave or sue for unfair dismissal. Why is assisting illegal immigration not treated as the serious and highly damaging crime that it is? Why are those prison sentences of up to 2 years not being routinely applied? Why are they not also facing prosecution for failing to provide necessary information and remittances to HMRC? For not complying with employment laws and health and safety regulations?
Maybe too, like Arizona, we should have a law that could close down businesses in the most serious cases. It might force these people to think about whether they should start giving some loyalty to the country they chose to come to.
Bah! Is nothing safe?
It seems from this that one can't even indulge in an innocent bit of (row 1, column 5(A)) with a (row 1, column 3(P)) without running a serious life-threatening risk of catching (row1, column 1). Row 2 is almost as bad.
Still, all knowledge is useful. We never knew before that one could catch rabies by kissing a horse.
Greetings Mr President. Now sod off
Here we have Obummer delivering platitudes in his usual fashion. Head right, "Every citizen deserves a basic measure of security", head left, "health care if you get sick", head right, "unemployment insurance if you lose your job", head left, "a dignified retirement".
Does EVERY citizen really deserve these things? Even able individuals who have spent much of their life on welfare? The habitual criminals who have been in and out of prison? Recent or unsuccessful low paid migrants who have made only the smallest, if any, contribution to our economy? The socialist crap is bad enough but when it's delivered in this tediously hypnotic way who can blame Ken Clarke for falling asleep?
As for Obummer's head left, head right, head left platitudes about Britain these are put into perspective by Nile Gardiner's article in the DT.
Labour of love
We at bloggoth have spent quite a few hours on this blog over the last few days.
So how come no new bollux for a week? cry the non existent readers. Cos it was all techie stuff. A bloggoth page just grows until it gets so big that it take ages to load and then we have to split it, change headers and titles in each page, modify all the links, non existent comments and Youtube lyricy things to match the new page numbers and remove all the commented out crap/illegal/libelous stuff we thought better of or never got round to finishing. Then there's the left hand links list that we couldn't be arsed to do before, not that anyone uses it.
Very dull to do manually but we have now written a bloggoth tool in Excel with VBA that does most of it for us. We enjoy the techie stuff of bloggoth as much as the actual bloggy stuff. We could soon add a button to insert a picture of Ryan Giggs automatically every 3rd thread if we wanted, bet you can't do that with Blogger, Wordpress or Typepad.
PS Just noticed our auto bookmark adder is incrementing from the top instead of bottom. Oh joy! More fiddling about with my tool!
Fact of life
Be too kind to anyone or anything in the absence of a real one to one relationship and you will usually get taken for a sucker. This is true of beggars, immigrants, neighbours needing favours or foreign nations taking British aid.
And little animals. We at bloggoth are barkingly kind to small creatures and what do we get in return? The birds we feed crap all over our garden paths, the wasps we supply with jam in the autumn nibble tiny scars on the garden furniture in the spring, the mice in the shed that we leave any dropped bird seed raid the fatballs and make nests in our running shoes. Now a tiny garden spider has built a web over our monitor. It does not seem at all bothered by the mouse accessing the menu right below it. We should squash it, most people would, but instead we shall probably transport it carefully down to the greenhouse where it will be able to find something to eat. Come late summer, if it lives, we will probably get its long hairy legs down our neck.
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Waste not
We at bloggoth do not follow football but we could not help noticing that West Ham will probably be relegated. What impact will this have on plans for West Ham to take over the Olympic Stadium after 2012? Can a first division club really afford the upkeep?
Maybe there should be some alternative money making uses for the stadium. What about a modern version of the Roman arena? We could have gladiatorial combats and other Roman style games that will not only be very entertaining but also get rid of some criminals and other awful/annoying sorts that nobody sane likes.
DISCLAIMER Opinions expressed in bloggoth cartoons are those of the cartoon characters and the inclusion of any such cartoons on bloggoth does not constitute or imply any recommendation or endorsement by we at bloggoth of any statement or opinions which may be expressed therein.
Bang on Silvio
Silvio Berlusconi has accused the left of not washing. Brill! So true too. All the leftists throughout history have been dirty and smelly. Stalin used to breed rats in his moustache, well known fact that.
That's what you get for voting for a leftist little-to-do-with-green-Issues party
Views wrecked by expensive and inefficient offshore windfarms? Extra council tax on poorly insulated houses? People banned from driving on alternate days to improve air quality? Council tax money chucked at green consultants? Householders fined for overfilled landfill bins? You might think those would be daft policies but at least they would be something to do with the environment, the sort of policies that many, the idiots who voted for this awful party without ever bothering to check further than the name, might have expected.
Instead, what do they get? A committment to set up sites around Brighton for travellers and gypsies. How is that green? How does it serve the residents and council tax payers of Brighton? What next? Brighton council houses for Afghan asylum seekers?
Fading memories
What if Genesis was a true account? If god created the universe he must have existed before it and some argue that this means that god existed before time itself. Bad move perhaps, could the invention of time cause even god to age? Eternity is a very long time and who knows?, god might turn senile. That could be interesting.
Andy Stewart
Oh no, we meant Andy Williams. The godfather would look wierd in a kilt.
Bloggers unite (but don't tell anybody)
The most interesting news item recently is about Morgellons. We have never heard of them before and don't think we have suffered from them. The only time we at bloggoth have found itchy or painful lumps with tiny threads in them is after we have been pruning those f*ing Dog Roses in our hedge. Plus that time when, er, no, we won't go into that. Suffice it to say that considering what she charged us you would think she could have been more careful.
The sufferers insist that the symptoms are caused by unidentifiable alien fibres growing through their skin. Others say that the wounds are self inflicted and that any fibres present are just everyday materials. This is said be a "delusion of parasitosis (DOP)", a psychiatric condition in which people falsely believe themselves to be infested and that this particular form of DOP is a mass hysteria that's spread through the internet, like the witch panic in Salem, Massachusetts in the 1690s but with worldwide scope. Bigger news about the super injunctions also shows the power of the internet; once an allegation is out there it becomes "fact" and posts on social networking sites, forums and blogs cite posts on social networking sites, forums and blogs as proof of truth. *Note
It's good stuff, the internet, but we wonder if we have yet really grasped its potential for influencing humankind. Bloggers are a bunch of egotistical individuals who are more concerned with number of hits than effect. When they do have a common agenda that agenda is so obvious from the quotations of each other's posts and the links that they are easily bracketed together and can therefore dismissed as a group. But what if a big group of apparently dissimilar bloggers got together in secret and really studied how the human mind works? If we knew exactly how to phrase things to draw on peoples' fears, if we timed posts to coincide with real news to maximum effect, if we knew how to reinforce a perception using apparently unrelated items, how much more we could do.
Note: Green Party leader Caroline Lucas wants to turn Brighton into a world centre for UFO research and is a member of No Borders. As we can't stand the woman or her leftist party we are very happy to mention these facts. If you don't believe it, check the readers' comments in The Brighton Argus for yourself. Truth is a mere detail when it concerns somebody we at bloggoth don't like.
Apology
It seems that Jews have received an apology over Spanish Inquisition executions. Quite right too.
When are The Tribe of Og going to get an apology from The Tribe of Ug for that appalling period, circa 350,000BC, when the latter took advantage of their bigger clubs to steal all the former's women?
PS Link to "Death Penalty News" only because the original Telegraph link has disappeared. Mind you, "Death Penalty News" does sound pretty exciting so we will be linking to it a lot on future. They do great recipes.
Why do intelligent successful people believe in such shit?
We are always puzzled how it is that the US, still the most technologically advanced and powerful country, is nevertheless so ruled by irrational, religiously conservative views.
You expect this in poor, undeveloped countries and you might expect it among the poor in the US, but religious conservatism is common among rich, powerful whites. It is really something when representatives of a rich Western country are influencing African countries to impose repressive religious-based laws and when polls indicate that over half believe in creationism.
A religious preacher is telling us that the world will end in 11 days. Really? The world ending yet again? Yawn. What's on TV that evening? It is not even the first time that this particular preacher has given an exact date for the end of the world, yet doubtless when the time has been and gone there will be a bunch of f*ing idiots who will believe his next prophecy.
People like this who claim that apocolyptic events are punishment for all the wickedness, lying, sexual perversion etc of the modern world clearly have no knowledge of history. He thinks things are bad in San Francisco? Maybe he should try reading about the Roman empire, after Caligula shagged another man's wife he was quite likely to shag the husband too. Tiberius kept crowds of young boys round his swimming pool as he liked plenty of choice and young included babies. Dishonesty, cruelty, promiscuity and perversion have been going on since man evolved as have wars, volcanos, earthquakes, floods and other catastrophes and there is not a shred of correlation between the two.
PS Although he is a former civil engineer who uses mathematics for his predictions. As a former chemical engineer we can certainly relate to such scientific methods so we had a look. Let's see, 21 May,2011 is 722,500 days from 1 April AD 33, the day of the Crucifixion and he gets 722,500 by multiplying the holy numbers 5, 10 and 17. Hmmm, that looks sound enough we must admit. Oh no wait! He forget to subtract the number of times the angel said "Come see" plus the number of dark horses in the Book of Revelations, what a silly elementary error.! Let's see, that makes the end date, ah! Better have tea early today.
Thoroughly ashamed
What is more pathetic than the ridiculous obsession of the man in the street with celebrity? We at bloggoth SNEER at such people, those horrible thick Sun readers who spend their time poring over news of the latest gossip about some B list soap star. We at bloggoth are intellectuals, our huge minds are firmly fixed on higher things.
But sitting at one of the open air tables in our local high street today was a familar face, it definitely was, we walked behind and heard the Gordie accent. Now we are going around telling everyone we saw comedian Ross Noble in *** today! How utterly pathetic!!!
Funny how nobody, even brilliant intellectuals like we at bloggoth, can ever pass up mentioning a celebrity encounter. Lord Beeching at a former workplace, Hattie Jacques in Selfridges, Derek Hart outside a London theatre, Dennis Waterman at London Airport, former Labour leader John Smith at Edinburgh airport, Alan Titchmarsh coming out of the bog at some motorway services and now Noble.
We can't imagine why we mentioned it. How pathetic.
PS Oh yes and some actress from Casualty outside a Filton cafe. Now we are even more ashamed.
Topic: Thoroughly ashamed Comment here. Comments so far: 0
Unbelievable
A bunch of shitty Muslims in London protesting against the death of Slimy Bin Liner and it is only the EDL counter-protesters that The Independent refers to as extremists.
This pussy footing around the issue of Islamic extremism cannot go on. If they will not tackle the people who support terrorist groups or the many more who want Shariah imposed on the West, if they refuse to stop the flow of people from disgusting societies like those of Pakistan and Bangladesh where extreme views on issues like women's rights and secularism have widespread support and where non Muslims are marginalised or subject to regular attacks, then many in the UK will feel they should no longer differentiate between Muslims at all.
In WW2 did we worry unduly about the innocent and decent Germans killed by our bombs? The children, the people who never wanted war and did not support Nazism? Of course not. There comes a point when the threat to one's future, to the future of one's society or one's nation becomes so severe that such civilised considerations become an unaffordable luxury.
We are not all there yet but if the authorities carry on as they do it is going to happen.
Kark Jenkins
Do we have psychic powers or what?
On May 1st we asked a technical question on CUK about Google's magnifier and gave a link to our interactive version of "Where's Wally?" called Where's Ossie in which you can move a magnifier to find Slimy Bin Liner in a crowd of people.
The very next day they find him and shoot him! We do not share a birthday with Nostradamus for nothing.
Death of a moderate man
Slimy Bin Liner obviously. Old Slimy? Moderate?? WTF are you talking about??? cry the non-existent readers.
Well, in one respect anyway. If you look at his life and at his pronunciations his driving concern, apart from Palestine, appears to have been the presence of the West in the established Islamic countries. He has called for global jihad to drive America and other infidels out but if he has ever called on Muslims to take over the entire world and subjugate us all into the global Ummah we can't find it.
Unlike some. Maybe the US should be sending its special forces and its drones into Luton.
Send her the bill 3
A Nepalese choir has flown to Heathrow for a Cornish gig and promptly vanished!. Yet another instance of the Nepalese pouring in from that poor and backward country since that stupid cow Joanna big mouth Lumley pulled her poor Ghurkas stunt on the nation. How long before the many non-english speaking, uneducated, unskilled and illiterate among these Nepalese decide it is all the nasty, racist white man's fault that they can't get jobs and inflict yet more migrant riots and crime waves on us? Oh joy!
Space age meets the middle ages
We at bloggoth have just launched our Android app on the Android market and have spent some time looking at other apps to see what sort of price we should set and how much description we needed on the site page. There are several Koran/Quran apps on the market and it's a similar story if you look for Vista/Window 7 widgets.
This evening I discovered more Islam hiding on my PC. A weeks or two back I downloaded what I thought was the instruction manual for my new phone, the document title even starts with my phone model. This evening I had a look at it to see why the bluetooth would not connect but could not find the word bluetooth at all. Looking at the index I found there a mobile compass feature. I hadn't noticed it on mine but if there was one it could be really useful for jogging. Oh no, wait a minute...."
Use the mobile compass
Find the direction of the Qiblah from anywhere with
the mobile compass.
1. In Menu mode, select Applications -> Qiblah
direction.
2. Press
Android apps, Windows 7 widgets, mobile phone GSP applications and Islam. What a curious juxtaposition of the technologically advanced and the socially backward.
H G Wells knew what he was talking about
The best pub in our village, just a short stagger from xoggoth Towers, closed down about 15 years back. Last week the next nearest, quite a reasonable place socially, went out of business. This just leaves two drinking establishments within walking distance, a very posh expensive place in the adjoining village where every house was built in Tudor times and costs 2 million pounds and the former British Legion clubhouse in our village.
They could not be more different and neither is of xoggoth class, one being full of toffee nosed gits and the other full of horrible common sorts. We occasionally go to both as there is no longer anywhere else you can go out for a drink without driving.
The whittering Eloi or the grunting Morlocks, it's a tough choice.
Here we go again, the usual double standards
Imagine if a pair of BNP spokeman told us that white British people should stay away from public places and off public transport near a Muslim festival. If they referred to a white supremicist group that had carried out terrorist attacks on Muslims (assuming such a group actually existed) as brothers. If they said that they understood why they saw Muslims as legitimate targets. If they said that there was a legitimate nationalist opinion that Muslims should be attacked.
Would they not be arrested for making threats or for hate speech? So why are these Muslim shitrags not facing criminal charges?
Real home security
Some bastard let all the air out of one of my van tyres last Sunday and the Sunday before so this weekend I had the front garden covered by a fairly obvious CCTV camera in the front window just in case. Fortunately our regular runins with MR PS a few years back caused us to be equipped with such things but it's probably just the appearance that matters. To our cheapskate non existent readers we suggest the bottom of a plastic bottle with some black tape round it and a bit of mains lead stuck in the back, home security sorted.
Something like this would be much better although obviously they should have beaten them to death. What crime is worse than damaging a van? Not as if there's any shortage of useless youth.
But enough of wider society, back to what really matters, MY van tyres. There are numerous quite cheap security devices on the market, conventional CCTV, radio controlled miniature cameras, motion sensitive alarms etc but clearly what they all lack are any decent lethal options. Come on Maplin at al, where are the security cameras with built in machine guns and poison gas?
A lonely little particle - will it find happiness?
New Scientist articles on nature or social studies always require login, presumably because people can relate to these topics. Articles on particle physics can usually be read without logging in as most people find the subject dull and incomprehensible and wouldn't bother anyway.
It is a great pity that the common man is not interested in something so fundamental to the nature of our universe and scientists should be doing all they can to change this attitude. Maybe New Scientist has dimly realised this by referring to a Lonely, spun out proton. At last an acknowledgement by a respected source that elementary particles have feelings too. That poor little proton, abandoned by its friends. No wonder it is spun out. Will it rebuild its life or will it descend into a spiral of reversed charge abuse? How can scientists be so cruel? There should be laws against such things.
What better way to raise interest in particle physics than to appeal to the public appetite for sex and celebrity? Of course they have sex! What do you think all that positive and negative and attractive forces are about? Particle collisions are just bonking, wahee! spread out wave functions! What use is CERN if it can't bring us some elementary particle porn? As for celebrities, obviously there is the mysterious Higgs boson particle, the Banksy of the elementary particle world, but scientists should be finding more.
And what about nature films showing the fascinating lives of these tiny creatures? Why is David Attenborough not hosting "Subatomic Life on Earth" on BBC? And how about some subatomic fictional characters? Now we have convincing cgi there is no excuse for Pixar not rolling out a few blockbusters about a brave band of Quarks using electroweak symmetry breaking mechanisms to fight off a hostile invasion by evil ZZ dibosons. In this they are aided by WIMPs ("weakly interacting massive particles") who discover their inner strength and save the day. The film ends with a romantic scene between the quarks' positive heroic leader and the negative gluon slave he rescued from the ZZ dibosons.
The utterly bleedin obvious is grasped - finally
Good grief! At last somebody else has woken up to the totally obvious fact that burning fuel to transport goods from fuel inefficient places like China or India is the very last thing that will reduce CO2 emissions and therefore any "green" taxes that reduce our own competititiveness are counter productive. We said this way back in bloggoth11:
Let's see, will this tax...
...
4 destroy the competitiveness of the UK economy even further requiring more taxes to be raised to support the total losers etc.
from a declining GDP and donating even more of our business to the likes of India and China, who won't give a fek about efficiency
or climate change, causing a global INCREASE in CO2 emissions just like Brownstuff's destruction of our road haulage business has already?
It is of course true that we at bloggoth possess the greatest mind the world has ever seen (or ever will) but actually that was not one of our greatest statements as anyone with an ounce of sense would realise it. In fact any squashed cockroach with Alzheimers could have realised that one. Why are our leaders so fucking stupid?
The instruction manual is lacking something
Pope Grandpa Munster has been responding to questions on TV. We did not say answering as he did not have any meaningful answers even when the questions were preselected and he could have put a team of theologians on the job to make himself sound more impressive.
The first question, from a little Japanese girl, was basically the one that people have been asking for centuries, "Why does god allow so much suffering?" Grandpa had no answer other than the one that the religious have been trotting out for centuries "Because god moves in mysterious ways".
This is curiously inconsistent of god. He appears to have given us very clear instructions as to what his will is, provided you accept the official interpretations of the vague, obscure and often contradictory scriptures. We know what we must believe, we know what is sinful and what is good, we know what our rewards or punishments will be in the next life. Since he took the time to give us all this helpful guidance would it have killed him to give us even a hint of what the fuck the whole rigmarole is for? Why a loving god could not simply place us all in heaven in the first place? Why we have to be tested like a bunch of laboratory rats in a maze who have to find their way out in order to get fed?
What religion gives us is like a detailed manual for a must have electronic appliance that tells us everything we need to know with one exception, why we need it at all.
More serious crime needed
A recent survey has shown an overall reduction in crime.
Yeh right, if you believe the figures. The accuracy is highly suspect, for reasons given here and here. Also, are changes of 2 or 3% even statistically significant? The righthand list "From the archive" on this link shows crime headlines from 2001 to 2009. Against those fluctuations, 3% looks like no real change at all.
But just suppose it was true. What if our wonderful authorities had really cracked it? What if serious crime continued to fall year on year until there wasn't any left? No frauds, no muggings, no rapes, no murders, no burglaries, no property crime and no crimes against the person of any sort. What would the police, the lawyers, the judges do for a living? More importantly, just think how very dull TV and the cinema would be if they could no longer churn out masses of low budget crime dramas.
Coming to ITV soon - Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Carelessly Discarded Crisp Packet.
But now we have an exciting new episode of Taggart in which an old lady forgets to send her tax return in on time.
Solution
I mowed my lawn today. Tedious. Then tried to strim the edges and got pissed off with the string spooly thing that kept falling off and hurled the strimmer at a concrete wall. Serves it right. Things can annoy us for 5 minutes then they are toast. Why do we not equip toddlers with nuclear weapons? The world's problems would be sorted so much quicker.
...
What a surprise!
As we said a while back people need to stop overreacting to mere gestures, whether it's some Islamist burning poppies or others burning Korans. However, as we also asked at the time when an Islamist got fined just £50, would similar leniancy be shown to the Carlisle Koran burner? Of course not! He got jailed for 70 days.
When will our authorities ever grasp that nothing raises dislike of any group more than unjustified favourable treatment? Do they seriously think these double standards are helping perceptions of Islam? The reality is that the hearty dislike many of us have for it, those of us who actually bother to look into the treatment of non Muslims in awful places like Pakistan and Bangladesh and think about what it implies for our own future rather than parrot PC mantras, just racked up another notch.
Fuck knowsist bastards
We at bloggoth are opposed to the principle of a hereditary monarchy but if we must have one we heartily approve of removing the concept of primogeniture. A civilised world where physical strength is not the most important quality has no need of the idea that women should be second class or second choice in an area, it's sexist!!!!
Hang on a mo though, that is not the only thing wrong with the succession rules. Primogeniture means first born. Why should the first born be the one to succeed regardless of sex? That's ageist! Why should a younger sibling be overlooked simply because he/she is younger? Maybe we should just have succession of the one who appears most suitable for the job!
Wait a minute! Surely that's elitist! What sort of role model does that provide to inspire the UK's useless people? Totally talentless sorts should be made to feel that they too are of equal value. Let's just choose one of the royal offspring at random. Much better.
Hang on! Surely there is a problem with the whole hereditary principle? It's, er, familiest! Why should anyone be king or queen purely by accident of birth? A much better idea would be if we had a sort of lottery for UK citizens and whoever won it, regardless of age, sex or ability, would get to be monarch and enjoy all the perks the position enjoys.
Oh no! Did we just say UK citizen? What were we thinking? How racist! We do apologise most sincerely. Obviously the lottery should be extended to everyone in the world. Some leprous rat boy in Pakistan has just as much right to nominally rule the British people and receive enormous perks from the British taxpayer as any upper class white stockbroker from Knightsbridge. We mean that most sincerely!
Hold on though. Why just people? What about the rights of other intelligent species on our planet? Why should gorillas or other apes be excluded? Or dolphins? Or that intelligent parrot? They are self aware, thinking, feeling creatures too, science has proved it! Ok, extend the lottery by letting them select the right peanut of whatever. What purpose does a king serve that is different from that of a great ape in a zoo cage after all?
On the other hand, just because a creature does not think in a way we recognise or because our blinkered science believes it does not think at all, is that a good reason to reject it? We should really open up the monarchy - anything that is observably living, right down to amoebas or bacteria, should have an equal chance at succeeding to the British throne.
Sorted! Wait a minute though, isn't that a bit, well, lifist?
Never again
Camera
Some bastard let my van tyres down last Sunday so, just in case they tried it again this weekend we had a remote camera set up but it didn't happen again. We did harbour a very slight suspicion that it was MR PS when he came back drunk from the club but more likely it was just some stupid kid.
Why do people do things like that? Who knows? Some are so wierd that maybe they get off on it. Come to think of it, the hubcap on the Land Rover over the road does look a bit hot.
Reincarnation
If you must believe in something for which there is no evidence whatever then it's as good a theory of an afterlife as any, so let's say it's true.
Why would your fate in the next life be entirely separate from those of others you know? Our nature is strongly influenced by our upbringing and we tend to have similar values to those we live among. This implies statistically similar Karma so that we will be rewarded or punished in a similar way. It is quite obvious that almost everybody who lives in some horrible common area will come back as one of those little hopping things you get on top of stagnant pools.
Me and the misssus have been sitting in the sun whittering so will both come back as Collared Doves. Male Collared Doves are always randy but there is another big advantage to the species. Female collared doves, like most birds, only have the one hole! This life or the next or in one of many lives to come, we will have her butt!
Maybe 2
Maybe depression over the awful things being inflicted on our nation should be called Daily Mail depression.
Not that the awfullness is in any way some invention of that paper. Compared to reality, its reporting is rather PC. In respect of migrant/minority crime alone, just take a look at the BBC Crimewatch's Most Wanted page or the London Crimestoppers page or numerous police most wanted pages, eg the West Midlands and you see the effects of the "diverse" society that was imposed upon us. It is the same pattern almost every month.
Maybe Guardian Readers are more sensible living in their dream world. The best policies, on immigration or anything else, would be sensible policies based on realities but if policies are going to be based on idiotic fantasy then the next best option might be to live wholly in that fantasy world and imagine a benefit despite the overwhelming evidence.
The fate of ordinary powerless rational people, those who can see what the bastards at the top are doing to us, who suffer the consequences and yet are able to do nothing about it, is the very worst of all possible worlds.
Maybe
Fekin eck. May be the depression but imagination has gone. Hard to think of a story for the writer's club and it isn't as though one needs enormously high standards. On the other hand, perhaps one just mislays such things in the same way as one loses one's reading glasses.
Hmmmmm. When we are storming about the house chucking things around looking for our reading glasses the missus always says "Where did you have them last?" If we knew that we would have already have looked there you silly woman! We have already murdered missus bloggoth about 36,483 times since we got married and the place is knee deep in her imaginary corpses, the mythical stink is overpowering. Anyway, when did we last have our imagination? Perhaps it's in the shed. Why not?
Intelligent people believe in life after death, telepathy, spirits, extra sensory perception, visions of the future (mentioning no names) etc and the fact that 99.999recurring % is all utter bollox, people remembering when their forbodings have come true but forgetting when they have not for example, is not proof that it all is however many extra 9s you add. So maybe things like imagination, feeling or happiness are not simply the result of chemical responses to our environment, perhaps they get detached like retinas and drift off somewhere.
Or perhaps some bastard has stolen it! There have been a lot of thefts round here recently. That's ok, now we are in on it we can just creep out tonight and nick somebody else's.
Haiti and other crap
We at bloggoth are great fans of zombies. It is surprising to know that, according to this they, unlike bloggoth readers, actually exist. Ok, they are not actually lurching dead people but living slaves fed Datura, a psychotic drug to make them compliant.
Hmmm. (It's a hmmmm sort of weekend). Even assuming that is or was true, not sure how common it is today given that it sounds an awful lot of effort when you can just use children as slaves. A child can be brought for $150 and before the earthquake 22% of households kept children as virtual slaves under the restavec system. The parents among the 54% of parents who live in poverty have some excuse for not caring for their own kids but how about the 22% of households in the other 46% who keep these children? It is clearly not out of altruism as they live in grim conditions, are worked constantly and beaten and most were turned out on the streets after the earthquake.
Another grim reality of the third world. It's nobody's fault where they happen to be born but a fact we keep ignoring at our peril when it comes to immigration or aid is this: The nations with the most poor and abused are the nations with the most and the worst of the users and abusers.