America invades Churchill Square - I send them packing.

I just popped down to Churchill Square to see if I could secure a PS3 for the Children at a sensible price.

I noticed, on my travels that , Ava fumble and Feltch have opened a Holister in the shopping centre, I thought, ooh, I’ll pop in and see about purchasing a woolly Titfer for this cold weather we are having. As I walked in a blond 5’7”, 17 year old gonk by the door wearing Holister jeans and t shirt said to me: “Hey, Wassup! Check out Sandy and juggrrghrhj, they make great Christmas presents”.

I stopped, dead in my tracks. I looked around, there were no Americans there, most people were under 35 stone in weight, there were no nasal whiney voices, no stars and striped bandanas and no one had been shot. Confused I turned and walked out of the shop, looked around, I was definitely still in Churchill square, Brighton. In England. Yet somehow, an American “greeter” had accosted me at my ingress and made noises at me. It happened again, I walked back in and the gonk spluttered : “Hey, Wassup! Check out Sandy and Ghreerrhrhj, they make great Christmas presents”. I stopped next to him, looked down and said “Hello, I am sorry I am not sure what you just said, I got the ‘hey wassup’ bit and the answer to that is nothing. Nothing is up. The bit afterwards, about Sandy and ghheegkjkdnkdjnkjnd making good Christmas presents, what do you mean?” He was somewhat taken aback, he looked up, gulped, let a bit of wee come out and said “Erm,, err.. erm.. Sandy and hgjkbhbhbrfbf they are perfume’s Sir, er over there – he pointed – they would make, ermm err, good Christmas presents”. I considered this for a moment and said, “surely that depends on who you are buying for? I remain unconvinced that my 9 year old son would appreciate a bottle of perfume for Christmas”. He said, “well err”.. I cleared my throat to save him continuing and said “Can I just clear something up? Are you just here to greet people as they arrive and to say that at them?” he looked at the ground and mumbled “We take it in turns, sometimes I do the till”. I said, “well in future young man, if you see a gentleman with a stiff upper lip, a man of purpose, someone that is clearly in full command of his faculties, a man like me for example, an ENGLISH MAN, hmm? Yes?” he nods “ If you see an English man like me entering this shop, may I suggest you take the opportunity to go and work at the till while we browse, if an Englishman needs the help of an assistant while shopping for a Hat, then an Englishman is perfectly capable of asking for it. And if an Englishman wishes to purchase perfume, he would visit a perfume shop, what is more, an Englishman does not need greeting at the door, this is a shop, the doors are open to all, the welcome is assumed as a given. Thank you.“.. I walked off. That told them. Wot!

A Letter from France!

Some of this makes sense to me, as it is work related. But look what babel fish does to French to English, and bear it in mind before trying to use it to look clever in future..

Enjoy:


Dear Mr Palmer

I did not take into account the food(supply) 230V of a new casket BMS in my main offer.

I calculate(code) you the operation, but can you validate me if I have to leave the TD-COLOCATE In or the TD-COLOCATE B?

On the other hand I you signal that we have to cross(spend) the cables of adjournment(transfer) of defect towards existing caskets BMS of the rooms COLOCATE and INVERTER, t-il there no doubloon with the proposed plan?

Regards,

Laurent Paccou




no Doubloon? Hahhahahhaa

Remember remember

Remember, remember the fifth of November,
The gunpowder, treason and plot,
I know of no reason
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot

Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, ’twas his intent
To blow up the King and Parliament.
Three score barrels of powder below,
Poor old England to overthrow;
By God’s providence he was catch’d
With a dark lantern and burning match.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, make the bells ring.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!
Hip hip hoorah!

A penny loaf to feed the Pope.
A farthing o’ cheese to choke him.
A pint of beer to rinse it down.
A faggot of sticks to burn him.
Burn him in a tub of tar.
Burn him like a blazing star.
Burn his body from his head.
Then we’ll say ol’ Pope is dead.
Hip hip hoorah!
Hip hip hoorah hoorah!

MITCH BENN - I'M PROUD OF THE BBC

The awesomeness of this knows no bounds.

Laws often limit personal freedom, but often that limit makes perfect sense. For example, A 20mph speed restriction outside a school or the banning of smoking in public places are two laws that limit our freedom in order to protect the lives of the innocent. I have no argument with this, if you speed past a school and hit a child, you will live and the child will die. That is patently unfair and should be stopped. Equally if you smoke in a bar, you may live yet a non-smoking bar worker may well develop a life threatening illness. So while I don’t like the smoking ban, I struggle to put forward a reasonable argument for its removal.

We can see how the law can be used to prevent ones selfish actions from adversely affecting others. Indeed I would suggest that this is what the law is best used for. But it’s more difficult to justify a law when the only harm one is doing is to one’s self. Sky diving for example, is a relatively dangerous sport compared even to Rugby or Boxing, yet it is perfectly legal. I think most of us accept that we should be allowed to take risks, as long as we are reasonably well informed of the likely downside. If I throw myself out of a perfectly functioning plane, for fun, then it’s my own stupid fault if my ‘chute doesn’t open. No one else is harmed, I knew the risks before jumping and I can’t complain really if I end up a statistic.

A micromort is a unit of risk measuring a one-in-a-million probability of death (from micro- and mortality). Micromorts can be used to measure riskiness of various day-to-day activities. A microprobability is a one-in-a million chance of some event; thus a micromort is the microprobability of death. Mathematicians use the term Micromort as a measure of the likelihood of mortality resulting from any given action. Sky diving measures 17 Micromorts. So for every 1 million sky dives, around 17 will result in a death. Travelling 10 miles by bicycle measures 1 Micromort, canoeing for 6 minutes measures 1 micromort and taking 1 ecstasy tablet equals 1 micromort.

This long winded pre-amble brings me to my question, why is taking ecstasy illegal? And more importantly, why is it classified as a class A drug, when one has more chance of dying cycling to work and back every day, than you do from taking an E or two at the weekend. And what is the point of the costly police time and effort? Who are the law makers protecting here? And from what?

As so many people enjoy taking ecstasy at the weekends without any negative effect, the classification of the drug as class A could lead E users to assume that cocaine or Heroin are equally “safe”. After all, the government tell us they are equally harmful, they are all class A.. If as a regular user you know E does you no long term damage and that deaths arising are no worse than death’s arising from crossing the road, you could be forgiven for assuming Coke and Heroin must be the same, as they are all Class A!

That is a dangerous message. Taking cocaine has proven long term health risks and is heavily addictive- unlike taking E (side effects are a problem, but rare). Addiction to cocaine - and the funding of that habit- causes crime and family problems and therefore negatively affects others in a way that taking E never could. So why do the government send the message that the two are equally harmful?

The government’s inability to form legislation based on evidence is shocking. When their own advisor (Professor David Nutt) recently made a similar point, he was sacked. A lot of this is tabloid politicking and the fault really does lie at the spineless politicians and the shameful misreporting of science in the mass media.

Think of the time and money the Police must waste stopping people selling and taking E. Think of the quality of the E people are taking due to the fact that the government cannot control the quality of something that is illegal. Think of how many people move from E to coke and maybe even Heroin as they mix with the same dealers, and the message form the government is that these drugs are no different to each other!

If ecstasy were legalised it could be licensed. The quality could be controlled, distribution to minors could be controlled, real scientific studies could be done on the long term effects of regular exposure and people (the people that take it anyway) would not be funding gangs of organised criminals when they buy them. They could in fact be paying taxes into the exchequer, perhaps to find treatment centres for heroin addicts, by getting people off smack they would no longer need to burgle your house in order to pay the illegal gangs for the heroin they are addicted to. It’s a virtuous circle, one that escapes the tiny minds of the Daily Mail pandering MP’s.

Legalising a relatively safe drug does not send the message that all drugs are safe. Quite the opposite, it shows people that some drugs are relatively safe and others – the illegal ones- really are not. Lumping them all in together does nothing but cloud the issue. People should have the right to take risks with their own bodies; I think the government has a duty to tell people what those risks are, not to lie to pacify an ignorant minority of voters.

That’s what I think.. What do you think?

Prawn Mayo

A medley of Prawns and Mayonnaise
in whole grain granary bread
'shame I am the only one
who knows it's Mayo on my trousers
And not spurt from my head.

Word of the day “Brobdingnagian"

Genius Lothario: “I have, madam, about my person, a member of Brobdingnagian proportions. Its weight multiplied by its volume equates to a mass that could not be imagined. The numbers required are beyond a googolplex, beyond even Graham’s number. And madam, It behoves me to impart to you that this member is throbbing, throbbing with the frequency and power of a pulsar and indeed with an intergalactic lake of blood coursing through it’s mighty veins! Madam, what is more, if you will allow me to thrust this giant member into you repeatedly with huge force and great alacrity, you Madam will see how the universe can have been formed in what can only be described as THE Big Bang.”

Buxom Lady: “ooooh my, Mr Hawkings!”…. Swoon.

Is the Pope a Catholic? I am not convinced.

As my journey through life has taken me from a little Christian to medium size Agnostic and now to gargantuan Atheist, I look back on my days as a Christian and wonder: Did I ever really believe in God? I think what I believed in was the message of Jesus, and what I liked was the possibility of an afterlife. But if I am brutally honest, the idea of Jesus being the son of God was always a conceit, an idea to be struggled with rather than something that I could see as a tangible fact. Some people call this conceit "Faith". The openness of Christians and other believers about the need for faith does raise a rather awkward question: If Faith is a requirement; do any of you actually believe that God is real? Do any of these so called believers, really believe in God, or do they pretend to for the sake of their religions?

Evolution, for example, is backed by mountains of irrefutable evidence, from the fossil records (which alone are proof enough for most rational people) to experiments in which evolution by natural selection has been observed in a laboratory, to DNA records and dating methods. Any rational person, with an inclination to learn can satisfy oneself beyond any reasonable doubt that the theory of evolution is correct. The theory has now been proven. No faith is required. I do not "believe" in evolution, it is now simply a fact in my mind, I have seen so much evidence that I can't conceive of a single way in which to undermine the theory and therefore I don’t need any faith or belief structure to support it. I don’t go to meetings to have my “belief” in evolution re-affirmed and I don’t pray to an imaginary sky ghost when the parts of the theory we don’t yet fully understand cause me to think long and hard for possible solutions.

So what of God? Well, there is no equivalent evidence of God's existence. The only evidence anyone ever presents to me is either some unrelated and shocking misunderstanding of the nature of science or the anecdotes of various vested interests. God is, by the believers own admission, a matter of faith. So what of faith? We know about confirmation bias, we understand about memes and the god spot, all things that can explain how humans are prone to “religion”, but aren’t humans also pre-disposed to moments of rational clarity? Can it be that the arrogant delusion brought on by religion is insurmountable and these people never actually sit and think "hang on a minute, none of this stuff really adds up?"

I don't think that can be true. To become Pope for example, you must have some reasonable level of intelligence, to have succeeded in ones chosen career to that level, Darth Ratzinger™ must actually be credited with intelligence. And so he must recognise (at least form time to time) that his own faith is just that, faith. It has no firm ground on which to stand, it is in fact a conceit. The mother of all conceits and therefore not real in any sense beyond the edge of fantasy, so if we can reasonably deduce that the Pope knows his own belief is simply his choice, he chooses to believe something rather than being forced to by irrefutable evidence, then he knows (if only at some sub conscious level) that God only exists in his head.

So is the Pope a catholic? Well, from time to time is my best guess. I would bet you £ to a penny that even he has that sinking feeling as reality takes over from fantasy. He’s obviously very good at suppressing it (probably puts it down to the Devils work or some such) But, he knows. All intelligent people of faith know. It’s just too painful for most of them to admit.

So perhaps, in the end, at the bottom of the well of thought, we are all Atheists; some just suppress it better than others. Some are just so shocked by the pointlessness of it all, that they ignore the cold blade of truth and hide under the warm blanket of religion. What most people of faith do genuinely believe is that religion is the best method with which to deliver moral structure and a sense of community (I actually disagree with this, but that's for another blog) and so, who can blame them? Putting one’s doubts and rational thinking to one side makes sense in that slightly twisted context.

The Pope is still a vile dirty Paedophile apologising, African child murdering nasty little Nazi though. Just because I have gone easy on his "faith" doesn't change the facts about this vile man's actions. ;-)
Peace.

Spewing forth on the environment

After the recent volcano chaos some hard-core environmentalists were wallowing in a lake of schadenfreude about our empty skies; they said that the world is a better place without all the noise and green house pollution caused by the wretched air planes. While they do have a point from an ecological perspective the fact remains that for the majority of us the whole thing was a huge inconvenience, not to mention extremely expensive.

What Swampy and his mates fail to see is that people still have to travel. That is simply the nature of the global economy we have created, this situation is unlikely to change quickly,in fact changing the way the world works isn’t going to happen over-night and people will not be persuaded out of their comfortable life-styles and into a Gee Whizz and caravan without a fight.

Some recent studies are tending to show that travelling over-land requires just as much energy as travelling above it. The idea that getting a train and a ferry is greener than flying may well be a fallacy. This was borne out only a few weeks ago by the BBC’s Tim Harford (AKA, The undercover Economist). Harford was stranded (by the ash cloud) in Stockholm, so he travelled back to the UK overland - predominantly by train. Harford calculated that the carbon footprint of his ferry/train/ taxi journey back to Calais was no less than it would have been had he flown direct into Heathrow.

Whichever way you skin it, and however badly spun the maths may have been, travelling long distances requires a lot of energy. If travelling over land is not always greener and is rarely more convenient than flying we have a real problem. The convenience of flying is a problem in itself as any attack on such hard won convenience always feels like an affront to personal freedom and a retrograde step. No one wants to give up flying, and there is some evidence that there may be little point; If you have to travel far you might as well fly.

But we still have a problem. The evidence for man-made climate change is incredibly strong. Too strong to be ignored. Doing nothing is simply not an option. There are many that argue the science is weak and too new to be conclusive. They may well be right. It is at least possible the climate change is not being caused by man, however it doesn't matter. What matters is that it might be us and it looks as though it probably is us. That is good news, seriously, it is good news that we are probably the cause of climate change. If we are causing it then we have a chance to reverse it, stop it, slow it or control it in some way. If we aren't causing it then we really are in trouble, lowlanders like me will have to grow webbed feet and start eating more fish, highlanders will need to stockpile the factor 50 and get used to living on a much smaller island.

So what can we do? Should we all change the world completely and all give up our freedom to travel? I think if the media and government continue to point the finger only at air travel and cars they are missing the elephant in the room. The fact remains that the very large majority of carbon emission caused in this country comes from our domestic dwellings and commercial buildings.

I think most of us would agree that we need to tackle domestic properties as a priority and look to greener power generation, Building Services engineers need to be making more of a song and dance about intelligent controls in buildings and people need to "get real" at home. The government seems to think that the market will drive this, but so far it hasn't, at least if it has the effect is small and slow.

There needs to be legislation forcing people to reduce their carbon footprint at home! The idea that we can have our cake and eat it is a delusion beyond any form of reason. Either that or we all need to see sense soon!

If you want to be able to fly to Corfu in the summer and you want to keep your car and the freedom it affords put a bloody jumper on when it’s a bit chilly and turn the fucking lights off in empty rooms!  And here’s the thing; we will be forced to do this before long anyway. By getting in first we can lessen the argument for less air travel and perhaps hold off the need to all drive round like pricks in a Toyota Pious for a bit longer. Of course security of supply is the biggest issue where oil is concerned, but for the time being, let’s at least tackle the real cause of climate change and give us all a break from this anti travel bull shit. Just for now, please. A Jumper and some warm slippers. That’s all you need!