Farmers Organic Holiday

So farmers are seeking an organic 'holiday' because of the pressures of the credit crunch. I can almost guarentee that those wanting this 'holiday' are the more recent 'converts' to the organic movement - you know the one's following the money. The same ones that followed the money when there were subsidies to be had for growing for the rapeseed industry or anything else where subsidies were the primary motivation. It wont be those that farmed organically from a deep philosophical conviction that is was 'the right thing to do.' The ones who swam against the tide when they were called yoghurt knitters and the 'beard and sandal' brigade. They're in it for reason other than pure profit. I'm sure they have to make a living but their motivation is more deep rooted than the extra organic premium.
I'm not against people wanting to earn money but, to paraphrase a recent well known speaker, do we have to compromise our principals for the sake of monetary expediency? I for one think this is a compromise too far. 

Hand Shandy Handy

It seems that apart from the fabled visual disturbance properties of the abuse of self it's all good in the world of Mrs Palm and her five sisters. New research has shown that masturbation in males over the age of fifty has a protective effect against prostate cancer. Unfortunately the news for the under fifties is not so good and frequent visits to the opticians are still the order of the day. As for you ladies sorry but there no good excuse for the old washing machine rodeo. More research needed perhaps.

24-Rolling News Spells The End of TEH World!

I was interested in this via Boing Boing because it gels with a slowly forming hypothesis that I've had inexorably spreading in my brain for some time. That we have nothing to fear but news itself. 
Ever since the advent of 24 hour rolling news the motivation to fill the 24 hour schedule with anything and everything however crass or alarmist is proving irrestistable to whoever produces it. Hence the point that News helped to stimulate the climate in which the poisonous thinking that led to the sub-prime crisis and also, when push came to shove, turned the escalating financial markets into reverse far more rapidly than they would otherwise have managed without nightly promotion on our TVs.
The problem is that, somewhat like the banks, insurance and mortgage companies, 24 hour rolling news is in a no loose situation. Whatever happens is grist to their mill. In the same way that newspapers frightened the parents of young children into avoiding the MMR vaccine and thus stimulated a measles epidemic which they then reported with equal glee , the credit crunch shows the same cause and effect cycle. The media get copy whatever the story - news on the fat cats, news on the unemployed and who can say, hand on heart, that they are not thoroughly sick of Robert Peston and the emmisaries of doom that parade across our screens every night. You know, the ones you appear to delight in news of the recession to the extent that they predicted it for 3 months before it actually arrived and when it did almost rubbed their hands and said 'I told you so.'
So here's my answer to doom and gloom. Shoot every news anchor, financial analyst, link man, reporter and news producer you can get into your cross-hairs. Yes. Do shoot the messenger because they're no longer just messengers are they? They are the fulfillers of their own prophesies. They deserve to be killed to death.

No More Attacks On Ws Watch?

Just exactly how many attacks were there before 11 September 2001? Much is being made of George Bush's protection of the USA and the fact that there have been no further attacks since. Even some Democrats have said that W must be given credit for this fact. I have yet to hear any one of our penetrative media pundits ask him how many attacks there had been before the Twin Towers attack. As far as I can remember America hadn't been attacked since Pearl Harbor and that's in the Pacific. So let's not get all maudlin and in a sort of post-coital torpor (you know, the one you get after you've been fucked) let this man off the hook.

Pudenda Pleasured by Prolific Portfolio

As if having your mortgage stifled by the financial brouhaha recent research by'scientists' has found that the pleasure women get from making love is directly linked to the size of their horizontal jogging partner's bank balance. The financial whizz kids with the money haven't just fucked the economy successfully but their heading for your women and they're fiscally tumescent. 
So not only have they got our money, destroyed our economy and got away scott free they've also scored on the sex front as well. Oh goody. That makes me feel so much better.

On another tack altogether just how do the 'scientist' discover this? I think we should be told.

How Difficult Can It Be?

Now let me get this straight. If I get myself into serious financial difficulties and go to see a debt counsellor, God forbid but just for the sake of the blog. I will be asked firstly to itemise my liabilities in order to estimate my likely level of debt and I'm just an amateur. How come, six months down the line from the Credit Crunch inception, the professionals, the bankers, cannot tell us, the poor saps who will be doing the bailing out as usual, what the level of their toxic assets are. 

Is it just (a) Incompetence in which case why haven't they been given their marching orders as any of us exhibiting the same level of incompetence would have been. Is it (b) unwillingness to disclose the level of their greed and the duplicitous extent of their financial feeding frenzy or is it (c) the usual level of arrogance that the city shows towards the 'little people'. (No not the leprechauns, though gnomes are traditional enemies of leprechauns or so I've been told.) Us, the great tax-paying public, the mugs that always end up paying for these financial shennanigans while the suited and booted roar off into the Caribbean sunset in their Porsches, Lear Jets and Sunseekers clutching their £1m bonuses in their sticky little mitts. 

Some in the financial sector are undoubtedly paying the price for this charade but as usual the main players seem to be Teflon coated and the only thing that sticks to them is money. 

Phrase du Jour...

Where in the hell did the phrase 'back in the day' spring from. I first noticed it in several Lee Child 'Reacher' novels where he seems to have a particular phrase in each of his many escapist novels that's repeated until you start expecting it on every page...almost. Now it seems to have descended into the common consciousness and it even graced the pages of last Sunday's Observer no less. 
Perhaps someone will write an algorithim to calculate the next likely ocurrence in the literature or the next likely phrase. 'Yes we can' maybe.

Remember You Read It Here First

One of the many groups to which I subscribe is a Yahoo Group on Mercedes Sprinter vans and their many derivatives. Whilst casually browsing its post t'other day I came upon a post by a Sprinter owner who has been tasked with erecting the PA system for the Obama inauguration which consists of many (3000 if memory serves) speakers mounted on poles in Lafayette Park with repeater amps at various points all of which is dull stuff except for the guy doing it I suppose, and he's having a blast. 

Oops careful with the bomb-specific terminology Rico, Homeland Security will be paying you a visit.

They're welcome to anytime. I'll make 'em a cup of tea. Anyway, dull stuff as I say but interestingly enough he mentioned in his post that his satnav was unable to lock onto a signal and he presumed it was being jammed by the aforementioned DHS and I don't mean the Social Services. Apparently they do this around George Bush's ranch in Crawford, TX for some reason, probably to prevent low level shoe-straffing runs by the local Muslim fanatics.

Lot of those in Texas are there?

Probably not on balance, but that's by the way of mentioning the mad Channels Islands flying vet, Maurice Kirk, who got himself in to all sorts of bother when he landed his light aircraft near said spread in order to hand deliver a thank-you note to the waning Prez for his (Maurice's) rescue by US Coast Guards. 

You could not make this stuff up!

Indeed not. He was detained with extreme prejudice, even unto the local funny farm, until is was established that he was a harmless British nutjob who'd done this sort of thing all over the world at varying times over the past twenty years or so whereupon he was deported back to Blighty with a stoney 'So long and don't come back'. 

Maurice Kirk, for it was he, was locked in chokey while the security services established his credentials. His long-suffering wife, asked to comment, said something to the effect that she hoped he'd be back by Sunday because it was his turn to do the washing up. 

Don'tcha just love the way it takes an englishwoman to bring everything back down to earth with humour.

I do, I do. Unfortunately, it seems, the US Authorities aren't seeing the funny side.

Think Right, Think Rat

I knew that some day the rat-based out-of-the-maze thinking that the old Rattus genus is justly famed for would come to the fore. This from The Register just proves my point. Just think you're never more than 12 feet from this kind of wisdom. I think we should move a motion in the UN for a warfarin moratorium. What say you?

What's In A Name

Names are important as Norwich Union, an insurance company with whom I have had some serious issues, will tell you as they try to infer that the name change will somehow miraculously bring commercial success and make them sexy overnight. But the latest reports of the Cyberknife on the BBC are interesting in that, without searching out the visuals, my imagination painted a picture of a thin-bladed switchblade-like surgical tool for slicing and dicing the dreaded malignant tumours that so plague society. I imagined the surgeon, flexing his fingers like James Coburn in the Manificent Seven, before sliding his Cybeknife from its sheath with a suitable steely sound effect and advancing on the diabolical tumour in a knife fighters stance, knees slightly flexed, eyes heroically narrowed. 

Imagine my surprise to find that the so-called Cyberknife is a massive robotic presence more Optimus Prime than Gillette. I've no doubt that it's a brilliant bit of technology and will advance the surgical treatment of tumours no end but I'd still rather my surgeon was James Coburn than that annoying robot that paints 'Picasso' on an endless lines of Citroëns.

Chaos and Opportunity

It is said that the Chinese ideogram for chaos contains, within it, the ideogram for opportunity.

Said by who?

What?

Said by who?

By those who know

Oh I see. 'Those who know.' The mystical cognoscenti.

The very same. 

To return to the matter in hand. According to this in Boing Boing chaos in the Californian housing market, with a multitude of foreclosures, is presenting the ever opportunistic CA skateboarders with the chance of using the emptied swimming pools of repossessed homes as improvised sk8tr parks.

See how down with the kids I am with the txt-speak and all.

Pillock!

Thanks.

You made up the stuff about the ideogram didn't you?

No.

Who then, is it said by?

I forget.

Yeah, right.