JOBSWORTH

OK - maybe I am a little late for some in saying this, but its time I started the Jobsworth chronicles, for all those crappy things about Apple that make me know its time other companies did something halfway to scratch.

Take a Bite!

We need a Big Bad Apple blog, not because I think they are, but because we should be aware of the alternatives!  Isn't this why we shunned Microsoft?




Now what to call it?

1. The Big Bad Apple, or
2. The Jobsworth Chronicles?

Park inn Antwerp pedestrian wifi

Try broadband speed test

BBC Ageist? You must be Working my Lunch

Well well well, Moira My Stuarts!! Have the BBC done it again?

They just announced they are axing Working Lunch, the link for which I Googled and couldn't find as a BBC News link (so much for balanced), which they also concede has a core audience of retired folks, currently at around 300,000.

Well, I also watch Working Lunch, and I have to admit not as much as I should BUT, frankly it is an interesting and well constructed program, which features articles in an accessible and concise way that I don't see anywhere else, and has a format that welcomes its viewers into the parlour.

So why should we have to watch a channel of predominantly journalistic content and all its current day banality and patronising presentation, when what we really want is an information program away from the journo-packaged conveyor belt that presents itself as an interest program, WORKING LUNCH!

Is this yet again the ongoing (denied) BBC policy of trimming off the quartiles to bland in, sorry, blend in the programming to suit a notional interquartile age and interest range?

And what about the unemployed entrepreneur, or the lunchtime tv at work?

England World Cup Bid 2018/22 backing instrumentally

When we did this tune about 4 or 5 years ago, we weren't sure where to place it.

The World Cup Bid came along, and I kept in the back of my mind figuring a way to get footage and buils a video.

Then the official video came along, and just to see I dubbed it over...

First I did the instrumental...

It's a little bit spooky...

backing the Bid for England 2018/22 World Cup Vocally

When we did this tune about 4 or 5 years ago, we weren't sure where to place it.

The World Cup Bid came along, and I kept in the back of my mind figuring a way to get footage and buils a video.

Then the official video came along, and just to see I dubbed it over...

The vocal miz was dubed after the instrumental mix turned out pretty good...

It too is a little bit spooky...

Jermaine the Pain

What can I say about Jermaine Defoe?

He scores a brace for England, and now he's doing a Robin Hood! What a cheek!

I am really happy for him. He's got a nice expensive lawyer who has a hearty reputation for handling footballers' motoring issues and whooping ass at the nick...

... regardless of his motoring conviction history, if that's what it takes for the disproportionate number of stop and searches performed on black British people to be brought to book then I really hope the police force are proper chastised.

Frankly, I don't believe this incident will make much difference to the life of the average black British man, but maybe every little helps. Anyway, I think Mr. Defoe has the right to do what he can to be treated according to proper behaviour. After all the police should uphold the rules in both directions.

To be honest, when Victor Anichebe was mishandled by police while he was on crutches, for

supposedly being a tea-leafing hoodie, I wondered if the cheshire police would be humiliated, but it seems not. Victor, if you ever read this, I would love to know what happened in the end.

Interestingly though, just look at the striking lack of similarity between a crutch, often used by people with leg injuries, and a gun, typically associated with robbers and jewel thieves...

Left is actually what a crutch looks like, some look a little different, but as far as we know only in the Day of the Jackal does a crutch become a gun.

Right is actually what a handgun looks like. Note how you wouldn't expect to hobble about on one.

Anyway, for those who can't afford it, and until things change...

Here's some thoughts on how to help the police do their job properly:

• Check out urban 75s for a guide on what to do when challenged by the police. it is important to be aware of your rights.
• Remember: the police do this for a living, they should know the routine off by heart, so
• they must be aware of what they can and can't do, and
• also know what you can and can't do, so
• they automatically have an advantage. After all, all we want to do is live our lives, and have as little to do with officialdom as possible, but in this case that means knowing what the rules of the situation are.

The Gadget Show Builds a Downhill Racer

Nice item from the Gadget Show Team on how to build a Gravity (or Soap Box) racer

FiveFWD - Soapbox race video from The Gadget Show

Posted using ShareThis

Our Great Country Send Bailiffs to kill Pensioners

Bailiff causes death of pensioner over parking fine

Congestion Charge IV

Ken Livingstone has decided Londoners aren't divided enough. So he has increased the Charge to £25 for higher emission cars - gotten the London jealous massive cooing, and the Chelserati growling. Clever little fuckwit that he is, he is convinced he is in the right. Nice one Ken. Meanwhile Porsche are wondering why he can't see little cars and big cars alike spew out more CO2 in his packed silly city anyway. Still, that's all old hat now. If they were all olympian athletes they could run or cycle everywhere, carrying heavy weights with them, or swimming up the Thames against the current. Shouldn't be too difficult. Mind the bendy buses though. Just when you thought you were doing the right thing Lord Ken pulls another stroke - snake like vehicles that have the power to squeeze out cyclists under their hungry wheels. Accidents are up. You're so cool King Kenny. Still why should cyclists have a good life? God Livingstone has really made sure the whole thing is a sham anyway. He has no idea what cyclists go through in traffic, especially when its part of their profession, in bad,wet, icy weather, stopping at every red light, legs screaming, brakes wet and ineffective. But hey, its cool to sanction all the construction an heavy vehicles to make sure your life is hanging by a thread.

And then when the mixed traffic already turns you half neurotic, get the police to start banging fines on your head on the spot.
Still they can't pay the congestion charge, so they must pay somehow for being out in public, at least until a law is passed to make them wear masks that measure their CO2 production... Lets face it, its not about common sense, its about money. Red Ken has become Master of the greenback universe. Funny how British socialists seem to make people pay more to exist than feudal landlords.

But all this is old news.

People, the Congestion charge was always a near criminal levy that stole money from people in its early stages to such an extent they had to change the draconian way they imposed fines to make it legal. Now the cynical bastards think they have softened everyone up enough they are 'removing the concessions to LPG vehicles'., That means if you comply with their demands they will come back and ask for your supper money a different way once they have your dinner money.

But building another runway at Heathrow is fine. Yes, because now you see they have discovered that jet engines are actually giant CO2 vacuum cleaners. The only trouble is the breathing passengers, who like the cyclists, don't know when to be green. Believe you me, if its what it takes to get the levy off them for breathing, pigs will fly.

The Road to Ruin

The authorities who should be spending money paid in fuel and road tax on road maintenance could be accused of negligence.

Its time to get the facts down in 1 place.
A new site is coming for the motorist.

For example, how much does it cost do lay a motorway with a road surface that doesn't leave spray to kick up on a road hours after the rain has stopped. How much cheaper is it to lay down a surface that does not?

How many Highways Agency Roadworks actively have teams hard at it all the time, and what is the average cost per mile of roadworks in the UK, and elsewhere in the developed world for that matter, where we can compare costs to see if we are getting value for money against any one else...

What has London done with its Congestion Revenue? Where are the accounts?

Is there anyone out there giving power to the motorist?

Are there enough drivers out there who care enough, or are the roads full of people, chins to the wheel, foot to the floor, jealous of their space or spaced out in a daydream on their way to work?

We need to hear from you, we need to gather the opinions of motorists, and I mean those who care about driving and travel.

We need to be able to help make information easier to get and use.

Wanted for Questioning...

Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Man

What kind of title is this?
"Cometh the Hour, Cometh the man"?

Let me tell you this, cometh the hour, cometh the end.

When the nation of Brits has sat in its decay long enough, immigrants taking benefits and sending them home, while government are allowed to stab industry just one more time, then one more time each day, taxing and bleeding the future until it has no more life in it, cometh the hour.

When the companies that set up here to get into Europe for access to the EU, finally all bugger of to Asia to save 80% of their costs, leaving the self-centred self-serving nexus of Westminster to feed off the remaining tax coffers to its civil servants and courtiers, cometh the hour.


When the whining and pining public, reduced to anarchy, bully and victim because the society whose rules they adhered to had broken down because the last law to penalise the common man or the last bit of freedom they had broke the fleabitten camels back, cometh the hour.

Cometh the man? Fuck off! There will be no-one to raise the flag and save the wreck from sinking.

Wherefore Art Thou ART?

When we think about art, where are we going? Are we

• trying to look at things afresh within a familiar framework?


• discovering a new insight thanks to an alien interpretation of the familiar?


• probing our own psyches to discover fundamentals about our own perspectives?


• beating a drum to those who live around us, either for support or subversion of the those structures around us?


• marrying what we know of our reality with what we can only speculate or wonder about?


• making comment or observation?


• establishing precedents to shape the future?


• build the defining visions of where our system wants us to be?


• saying 'I love you' or 'I worship you' or 'This is you'?


• giving free reign to expression without any intent or target?

I guess art has been all of these things, and conversely each of these things has a detractor who would say that this is not art, but is irrelevant or a mugger pretending to be art.

This the kind of blog that is not a researched essay with reference to everyone else's collected wisdom, and anyone reading this will have to guess what is me and what isn't in what I am writing, I am not trying to figure that out myself.

For the sake of my 10¢ I have this blog, and there are so many 10¢ out there...

... so I guesss I had better get to the point! But not until I have juxtaposed another list of statements...

1. H.G. Wells is a barely appreciated author in the United Kingdom, yet he was a very active, prominent political writer. Go check out the Wikipedia summary. I believe Jules Verne is far more celebrated in his own land.
   
2. For 400 years (yes, 400 years, that, by the way is double the 200 being 'celebrated' by the establishment this year) Christopher Marlowe was demonised as a conjuror of devils or marginalised as a twee precursor of Shakespeare.
3. TS Eliot was taken seriously.
4. Kipling is largely ignored in schools.
5. Britain has no industry.
6. Submarines built out of tyres are considered controversial.
7. The Church of England has no say in national affairs, yet every prime minister claims s/he worships God. British people generally I believe have no real feeling that their own parliament serves their own interests at all. Yet Muslims in this country have a parliament that represents their interests. Click on the link and see for yourself.
8. There is no industry in the United Kingdom any more, and the government seems to want to socially engineer the SUBJECTS (not citizens) of this country into filling the unskilled service work that remains (lets all be call centre operatives, and then give up our jobs to foreign cheaper centres), while cheap labour comes in from Europe and former colonies to perform the (often skilled) manual tasks that we are no longer trained to do. It seems these workers are the new 'niggers and navvies' that this scept/red/ic isle has used throughout the ages to build its structures: workers it then ignores in the reckoning of its own greatness. Difference is these guys have the choice of going back home. Or maybe I have gotten it wrong? I don't think so. Cool Britannia was stillborn, Long Live Same Old Same Old.
9. Have you ever noticed that the island Britain looks like a Hogarthian stooped seated old hag?
   

So where is the radical art that might bring the book to our faces and make us think critically about our native land, when even the shape of the land mass mocks its history?

Tweetie birds on poles, formaldehyde beasties? Another Place, much as I like it, only achieves a radical interpretation in the mind of the beholder.

Versus Picasso, Goya, Da Vinci, Mozart, Soyinka. Like I said, 400 years since we as a nation even tried.

But Let's not forget, when do we as a nation even bother to think of art?

Its all very well having Alan Yentob, Brian Sewell, Melvyn Bragg, but what is going on when the very media that produces programs by them only discusses art in the public domain beyond 'art programs' in the vein of a mad hatter's look at what the Laputians are up to.

Is my own lack of faith a product of this environment?

Last List before I stop: I think I am getting confused and developing a bipolar approach to the whole subject:

1. Does this country fail to educate us adequately in the capabilities of our own brains?


2. Brilliant though our artists may be, their relevance to our predicaments here is somewhat encoded.


3. Britain does not want to use the intellectual capacity of its subjects beyond the sustenance of its own status quo.

I know this entry is confused - I am confused. I am sure I will revisit it and tidy it up, again!

Boys, you need to get spanked!

Embarrassingly, I was born in England, Yorkshire, in fact (which gives me at least something to salvage - thankfully when it all gets too much so that even being a Yorkshireman isn't enough, I can retreat back to my Scottish or French parentage, and take what comfort I can from that), so I from time to time have no choice but to ponder what it is to be English.

And what it is at the moment, is to have a prima donna pack of dizzy deborahs running around a daisy field calling themselves professional footballers, making the art of football look like a real embarassment.

Is English football so bad, and the English so feckless, that the only reason the premiership can be called so is down to the myriad of foreign TALENT - and we must call it talent, in contrast to the pack of BOOBIES that haunted Israel for 90 minutes yesterday, Saturday 24th March 2007, during a predictably unwatchable Euro 2008 qualification international game?

So predictably unwatchable, I DIDN'T WATCH!

There is generally no doubt that they can all play football, and we have even seen evidence of that in the premiership, so who lobotomises them every time they put on an England shirt?

I have a theory.

They get paid too much and the media make them think they are little gods, when in reality they are a bunch of lads who can't believe their luck that they get paid insane pots full of cash only found previously at the end of rainbows or in Leprechauns' lairs, and so predictably behave up like lost brats with no sense of what they have to do to earn it.

I get tired of listening to my dad saying how the game today is not the game he played
65 years ago, when he played against the likes of Danny Blanchflower and Bill Shankley was up and coming.

I get tired of it, but maybe that is because I can't believe something, in a universe ruled by evolution (unless you are a crazy religious intelligent designist with a penchant for making round pegs fit into square holes) can actually regress and not evolve. It doesn't seem to fit the laws of nature.

So I guess I must apologise to my dad and his generation, who indeed seem to know something we don't.

Dad, I am sorry, (English) footballers of today haven't got the heart, do not display the skill, and don't know how to play football.

The should all be put over a collective paternal knee and spanked until they weep, and no play acting.

Yes, the little brats should have their pocket money taken away and given gruel and chores until they realise they do not know it all and should learn their place, and their trade.

I will leave someone else to blog about Steve McClaret, Trier Venbabbles, the Swedish 1 (what was his name), the insane amounts of money the FA get from SKY, and whether there is corruption in football.

For now, I am going to build a list of:

Things the Older Generation of Footballers Can't Understand about
The Way Footballers Play Today.

I would really appreciate comments on this one, from players of the past, or their scribing blogger listeners/relatives/students, but I can start without you...

A Sombre Reflection

Brittle Steps in Mists

Walking with lies all around you,
Expecting faith and getting death,
Brittle steps in mists of foggy winter
Along the river.

Waters cold and feeling icy,
Expecting cleansing getting ill,
Frozen kicks in swirls of murky winter
Along the river.

Judgements live to bind and gag you,
From Guilty Parties in the crowd,
Confused mind in thorns of twisted landscape
Along the river.

Drinking ghouls forget to feel life,
Expecting nothing, getting it,
Placid souls in boats of silent mourning
Upon the river.

The End of Houses of Parliament Sauce, Mr Bond

You may or may not have read a scurrilous article about the shame of MPs heating costs and their inclination to preach to everyone else.

Well, Heinz have decided HP Sauce (which OF COURSE stands for Houses of Parliament, hence the picture on the bottle), invented in this country and consumed mostly in this country, shouldn't be made in this country any more.

They are moving it to Holland (Click for report), where I suppose they will add their 'potato salad' cooking flair to the product. Then ship it back here to where all the HP addicts live.

Actually, if you look at the effort they put into the HP Foods website after they took HP Foods over, you might be inclined to say "Probably should have seen that coming, about on day 2 of the takeover negotiations, if there were any.

Is nothing sacred. What would Jack Sprat say?

Incredibly though, we did get Aston Martin back from Ford Motor Company.

Seems it has been making money while Ford in general has not, and so it was a sellable asset. Even then I understand they did a 1/2 price deal on it!!

Oh well. Hurrah!

Oh yeah, and you can get Casino Royale on DVD Now. Hip Hurrah!

A Philosophical Pause...

There are so many things you don’t want in life, and so many things you end up having that are on that list.

Don’t let yourself fall into the trap of thinking co-operation is a way forward in this world.

It is not.

Co-operation in itself is a sentence of purgatory, the length of which is determined by the time you give yourself up to it.

I am not saying all systems are wrong, and all the things people want to do with their lives, and need other people’s compliance on, are bad, and that the world is in a constant state of self gratification and simultaneous frustration, though if you try looking at it that way, you will certainly see it. There are however a lot of tides out there that will take you away from sure: you have to be a strong swimmer, or climb aboard a passing vessel, to get to your firm footing if you find yourself in the wrong current.

In a heavy sea a big ship needs a strong captain.

Even in a light sea, a solitary swimmer needs a clear mind.

Did the advertisers Really Mean This?

This advert appears currently in the London Underground, on the other side of the tube line.

You can't therefore easily express your confusion on it in situ, so thanks to the miracle of camera phones, I lifted it for enhancement.

I think my confusion is fair.

I can usually tell when the advertising agency is having a laugh with their client, but in this case I dunno.

Do GRANT & THORNTON intend they be an ant that has somehow gone off the rails and believes itself to be a queen, or a stallion of a pack? Wouldn 't that imply

DANGER! DANGER!
DON'T GO THERE PROSPECTIVE CUSTOMER!!
LOWLY ACCOUNTANT HAS SERIOUSLY LOST THE PLOT,
AND STARTED CHANTING SIX LEGS GOOD, TWO LEGS BETTER

Or perhaps the agency has decided Grant Thornton can't see they are having the mickey taken, and so have subtly undermined their intention of wanting to appear as the most dutiful innovative ant there ever was.

C'mon, there is no such thing as a leader ant better than the rest. If you squash 1, another ends up at the front of the queue, 'leading'. Oh dear. That isn't a very good message is it?

Or perhaps agency and firm just don't care enough about making sure the message is water tight and consistent, in which case why would you want to use the services of either?

Dodgy Petrol

I don't know about any one else, but I have already noticed that petrol has slipped upwards a couple of pence in the oil company stations during this time of trouble over Morrisons/Tesco petrol and silicon contamination as it now appears to be. Immaculate timing?

But hey, while no-one has noticed, lets tell everyone prices might have to go up because of demand...


... MEAN WHILE Although oil prices have crept up this month, had anyone noticed a fall in price in the past few months - $64/barrel in December to $52 mid-January. How long does this take to feed through, and what is the latest price rise down to, if not opportunism?

Network Rail Owns Up

Richard Branson has praised Network Rail for owning up as responsible for the Cumbria train crash that has so many similarities to Potters Bar, adding perhaps thy should listen more to the rail companies who bear the front line risk of carrying passengers over potentially hazardous maintenance. One suggestion involvede more localised management responsible for track maintenance, resulting in more intimate ownership of rail.

Makes sense to me, centrally controlled bureaucracy backed managment have been putting Brits to death since the R101 nad probably before.

I think I hinted at something like that in my last blog.

Network Rail took over 5 years ago, after the Potters Bar disaster, so it is not as though they haven't had time to get it right. Its a shame they can't fail an exam, rather than cause tragedy.

But anyway.

When you actually have a business to run, it seems, you seem to have more of an idea of what to do.