Carter Magna

You know you're getting old when

2012-02-17T20:52:00.000Z

You know you're getting old when you don't just race the flush and lose, you lose to the cistern filling back up as well.

My 35^th is in two weeks time. FML.

England Football Manager Social Media Response

2012-02-08T20:39:00.000Z

The tweet of the damn day:

Brilliant.

New Year, New Uppal

2012-01-12T12:37:00.004Z

I can hardly be bothered to update this thing anymore as it's a lot of work for little reward. I'm sure I'll be back at some point but for the time being, please content yourself that the MP for Wolverhampton South West, Paul Uppal, is working very, very hard on his own behalf. Take it away Mr Vole: New Year, New Uppal?

Sometimes Miss, I Wish You Were A Man

2011-12-13T10:14:00.002Z

I've taken this post down. Not because it was inadvisable or any of that crap (it was about hitting girls by the way) but because as the day wore on and I talked to some of my friends about it, there were more things I wanted to say on the subject. That in mind, I'm going to go away, cook my dinner, have a beer or 5 and finish the post properly.

Stay tuned.

Lucky Boy

2011-10-06T15:32:00.001+01:00

Getting into work was a complete nightmare this morning. A burglar was shot in the leg last night at around 8pm and despite the Police knowing who was shot, what he was shot with, who shot him and whyl, this did not deter them from closing the road between Hereford and Worcester causing absolute chaos right back up to Junction 7 of the M5.

As is usual for this back asswards country, the man who was burgled has been arrested for attempted murder.
http://www.herefordtimes.com/news/local/9292110.Leigh_Sinton_shooting_update/ The bloke is in his 60s and it looks like there were two men in their 20s trying to rob the poor old sod.

Personally, I think the young man with a hole in his leg can count himself as quite fortunate. I would have gone straight for the centre of his face, passed the noise off as a firework and dug a shallow plot for him under the azaleas.

Hahahahahahahaha! Yeah, I'll Fall For That.

2011-09-12T23:01:00.000+01:00

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I have to tell you (video.. Lamb Roast 2011)

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Just How Stupid Are Some People?

2011-09-09T13:10:00.001+01:00

Jesus wept.

Carter Vs The Fonz

2011-09-05T22:04:00.000+01:00

You may or may not have noticed that I haven’t been bleating about my car lately. You may or may not have already guessed that I am about to do just that.

If you have ever owned or worked on a turn of the century diesel Mondeo, then you may be familiar with the term Dual Mass Flywheel. If so, then you will also be familiar with the cost of installing such an item. Symptoms of the DMF failing are problems with the starter motor and clutch noise. Over the last few weeks I’ve noticed that the clutch sounds a mite dodgy when pressure is applied and that every now and then the starter motor will cough rather than turn. This cough is the sound of teeth rapidly spinning and failing to engage properly.

Yes. I wince every time.

On Saturday, after a game of golf where I snatched defeat from the jaws of victory (I was 10 shots up on my oppo after only 8 holes and managed to lose the game by 1 stroke), the starter motor did something even more worrying than usual; it just span and didn’t even try to engage with the flywheel. No “Ouch” sound but no bloody useful activity either. Whilst ordinarily being stuck at the golf club would be a good thing, my feet were hurting and I wanted to go for a pint.

Between me and my golf partner Bazza, we managed to get it going. I’m not sure whether rocking it back and forth whilst in gear or whether a few smart taps on the bell housing with my putter did the trick, but it got going again and a pint was had.

Bazza insists it was the car sensing his need for a beer, but he credits my wagon with senses beyond those of a normal mechanical item. Since then, it doesn’t like to be started and I have regressed to my superstitious and ham-fisted ways in getting the thing going. My method is far from exact and it is not good for the flywheel (which I think is duff) but as long as I can get to and from work for the next two days, it will do.

It’s booked into the garage to get the clutch noise looked at and I’m looking at a new thrust bearing, clutch kit, Dual Mass Flywheel and a boatload of labour which will cost more than the parts. Couple that with the 125,000 mile service and two tyres it had last week, I’m looking at more than I paid for the car in the first place, which was only purchased 10 months ago.

As is usual for this time of year, I face the dilemma of paying for the work to be done or doing the Annual Carter Used Car Dance which so amuses my work colleagues. This year, I think it’s a no-brainer. I’ve been looking after this car, it drives very nicely and aside from this latest rash of problems that are directly related to the DMF, it has a clean bill of health from the Ford dealership that carried out the service.

When I was a young man in my late teens, every car I had made me feel like The Fonz and I hadn't expected this one to.

You may wonder how on earth a Cortina Estate or a Sierra with a max speed of 65mph or a MKIII Escort 1.1L could ever make anyone look cool. Well, in short they didn’t. What they did all have was secret button that only you as the car owner knew about. When the Fonz hit the Jukebox in just the right spot, that was me every morning getting ready to go to work.

“Carter, your car won’t start!”
“Have you got the choke pulled out two thirds?”
“Yes.”
“I have you turned the ignition on and off 3 times?”
“Yes.”
“How old was the chicken that you sacrificed last night?”
“About 6 months I think.”
“6 months? It’s never going to start then is it you stupid bint!”

Give it here. No one else can start *my* car.

Or at least that’s what I told myself it felt like. They were pieces of crap that should never have been on the road in the first place, not supernatural beings that only I could control. The thing was though, that I had convinced myself that after a car reached a certain age and had been through a certain number of owners, it attained a level of superstition and mysticism that guaranteed only the owner would be able to start the car with any amount of regularity. Fonz Style.

While it was nice to feel 17 all over again, it will be even nicer to return to relatively worry free motoring. It will be a shame to get rid of this car. The fag lighter works and as any fule no, that's the sign of a good car.

Did you ever get halfway through a task and think "What the hell am I doing?"

2011-09-04T15:40:00.001+01:00

I have.

On my way to V Festival

2011-08-19T08:13:00.000+01:00

I'm going camping this weekend and for once, not in the high heels and stockings sense. This was last year, where I was the victim of a piss bomb, some swine scored a direct hit.

This was the year before.

The car is loaded up with Guinness and I'm looking forward to this one. See you in four days people.

As If There Was Ever Any Doubt...

2011-08-17T22:42:00.001+01:00

Piers "Morgan" Moron, is quite possibly the most egregious piece of human garbage, I have ever had the misfortune to be aware of.

To use an expression once use on me in am extremely infamous blog post: a useless waste of organs.

I was called something far less pleasant than that too, but I shall move on.

Somehow, through some kind of Faustian deal, Piers Moron has managed to go from putting British troop's lives at risk and insider trading, to having a prime time spot on American Telly, giving genuinely clever and worthy people grief, for being atheists. Read this article by Penn Gillette.

I don't know, so I'm an atheist libertarian

I try to claim that I was friends with the genius Richard Feynman. He came to our show a few times and was very complimentary, and I had dinner with him a couple times, and we chatted on the phone several times. I'd call him to get quick tutoring on physics so I could pretend to read his books.

No matter how much I want to brag, it's overstating it to call him a friend. I would never have called him to help me move a couch. I did, however, call him once to ask how we could score some liquid nitrogen for a Letterman spot we wanted to do. He was the only physicist I knew at the time. He explained patiently that he didn't know. He was a theoretical physicist and I needed a hands-on guy, but he'd try to find one for me.

About a half-hour later a physics teacher from a community college in Brooklyn called me and said, "I don't know what kind of practical joke this is, but a Nobel Prize-winning scientist just called me here at the community college, gave me this number, and told me to call Penn of Penn & Teller to help with a Letterman appearance."

I guess that's close to a friend.

My friend Richard Feynman said, "I don't know." I heard him say it several times. He said it just like Harold, the mentally handicapped dishwasher I worked with when I was a young man making minimum wage at Famous Bill's Restaurant in Greenfield, Massachusetts.

"I don't know" is not an apology. There's no shame. It's a simple statement of fact. When Richard Feynman didn't know, he often worked harder than anyone else to find out, but while he didn't know, he said, "I don't know."

I like to think I fit in somewhere between my friends Harold and Richard. I don't know. I try to remember to say "I don't know" just the way they both did, as a simple statement of fact. It doesn't always work, but I try.

Last week I was interviewed for Piers Morgan's show (which used to be Larry King's show). Piers beat me up a bit for being an atheist (that's his job) and then beat me up a bit for being a libertarian (also his job). He did this by asking me impossible questions, questions that none of us, Harold, Richard, me, (or Piers), could ever answer.

He started with "How did you get here?" and I started talking about my road to showbiz and atheism and he interrupted and said he meant how the universe was created. I said, "I don't know."

He said, "God," an answer that meant Piers didn't know either, but he had a word for it that was supposed to make me feel left out of his enlightened club.

Then he asked me what we could do to help poor people. I said I donated money, food, medical care, and services and he said, "No," he meant, what could society do to solve the problem of poor people. Again, I was stumped.

He said the government had to do it, which I interpreted as another way of saying he didn't know, but he thought that made me look mean ... even though I do care and do try to help.

What makes me libertarian is what makes me an atheist -- I don't know. If I don't know, I don't believe. I don't know exactly how we got here, and I don't think anyone else does, either. We have some of the pieces of the puzzle and we'll get more, but I'm not going to use faith to fill in the gaps. I'm not going to believe things that TV hosts state without proof. I'll wait for real evidence and then I'll believe.

And I don't think anyone really knows how to help everyone. I don't even know what's best for me. Take my uncertainty about what's best for me and multiply that by every combination of the over 300 million people in the United States and I have no idea what the government should do.

President Obama sure looks and acts way smarter than me, but no one is 2 to the 300 millionth power times smarter than me. No one is even 2 to the 300 millionth times smarter than a squirrel. I sure don't know what to do about an AA+ rating and if we should live beyond our means and about compromise and sacrifice. I have no idea. I'm scared to death of being in debt. I was a street juggler and carny trash -- I couldn't get my debt limit raised, I couldn't even get a debt limit -- my only choice was to live within my means. That's all I understand from my experience, and that's not much.

It's amazing to me how many people think that voting to have the government give poor people money is compassion. Helping poor and suffering people is compassion. Voting for our government to use guns to give money to help poor and suffering people is immoral self-righteous bullying laziness.

People need to be fed, medicated, educated, clothed, and sheltered, and if we're compassionate we'll help them, but you get no moral credit for forcing other people to do what you think is right. There is great joy in helping people, but no joy in doing it at gunpoint.

People try to argue that government isn't really force. You believe that? Try not paying your taxes. (This is only a thought experiment -- suggesting on CNN.com that someone not pay his or her taxes is probably a federal offense, and I'm a nut, but I'm not crazy.). When they come to get you for not paying your taxes, try not going to court. Guns will be drawn. Government is force -- literally, not figuratively.

I don't believe the majority always knows what's best for everyone. The fact that the majority thinks they have a way to get something good does not give them the right to use force on the minority that don't want to pay for it. If you have to use a gun, I don't believe you really know jack. Democracy without respect for individual rights sucks. It's just ganging up against the weird kid, and I'm always the weird kid.

How did we get here and how do we save everyone? I don't know, but I'm doing the best I can. Sorry Piers, that's all I got.

There's no way in the world that that ignorant excuse for a journalist, would ever have gotten away with that blind Jeebus crap over here.

No way.

I'm quite glad we've managed, as a nation, to quietly disregard what the religious nuts have to say, whatever their creed. Anybody who watched that interview from a sofa in good old Blighty would have tutted and shook their heads at the Moron's pandering to the religious crowd and his idiotic assertions.

The only good thing Piers Moron has ever done, was unwittingly lead me to that article. Penn Gillette's "Idon't Know" was a masterclass in class and puts across the Libertarian viewpoint in a manner not seen since Leg Iron.

Feeling Silly After The Riots

2011-08-10T16:21:00.003+01:00

A Poundland getting looted... Not in Wolverhampton it should be said.

Last night was pretty creepy. The usual sounds of traffic and ambulance sirens from the depot up the road were missing. There were some sounds early in the evening but as the night wore on, it seemed that most people had stayed at home and my car was still waiting for me in the same place as I'd left it; on its oil spot.
I made my way in to work, trying to think of good stories to tell my workmates but apart from "it was so quiet I could actually hear birdsong when I got home and it made me scared", there was nothing to tell.

It would seem that the majority of the trouble had been during the late afternoon, that it hadn't left the city centre and had stayed within the ring road. http://www.expressandstar.com/news/2011/08/10/223338/
In the cold light of day, back here at work, it seems silly that I felt as paranoid as did last night. I mean, I literally barricaded the side entrance to the house and had my heaviest cricket bat at my side! The flatmate Masher went to bed with his golf clubs but, to be honest, he's been doing that every night since he got his brand new set last week.

There was plenty of Twitter action going on, from the frightened to the frivolous and one of many tweets that caught my eye bemoaned the fact that anyone in expensive trainers, brand name clothing and being organised using smartphones, could ever claim to be in poverty. No argument here. Everyone that was looting in Manchester, Brum, Wolves, West Brom and Bristol had absolutely nothing to do with Mark Duggan (http://inspectorgadget.wordpress.com/2011/08/04/man-dead-and-police-officer-hurt-in-tottenham-shooting/), they were out because they thought they could get away with it and it's been on the way for years.

Over the last decade or so, England has been called a police state by many, yet it is quite clear that this is far from the case. The serial offenders haven't been getting locked up for any serious amount of time for a while now. It doesn't even matter to them if they do go down, It won't effect their job prospects because they had none to begin with and, and this is crucial, they don't care.

If we lived in a police state, the looters wouldn't have dared to attack. If we lived in a police state there would be a fair few mouthy students with bruised bones and the EDL would get their backsides handed to them before they even gathered in the car park of the Three Feathers, to protest the corner shop that belongs to a dusky skinned gent who has the temerity to sell news and booze to decent white folk.

If we lived in a police state I wouldn't be able to go about my business without fear nor favour either. No utopia to be gained from that. I would love to say "The Police must distance itself from political control and revert to the Peel Principles upon which it was founded", because that would actually be nice. The Peel Principles are fairly Libertarian as far as I can see and they make good common sense. But that will never happen. Their world is run by HR and that, is that.

Ever since 1997, Tony Blair and his pals paid back the miners by systematically de-fanging the police and we have ended up in this situation. Labour grew the existing client state with mass amounts of social engineering and they mortgaged the nation's futures whilst doing it. The people that pay the bills, do the cleaning, keep this country operating have been kicked in the ass yet again because the extraordinarily entitled underclass continued Labour's social experiment to its logical conclusion: smashing down shop doors and just taking what they want.

There were no banners, no protest chants, no reason that could be called reasonable. These weren't hard working people that have been pushed to the brink by the ever rising cost of living, these are people that have never done a days work, that don't intend to and see no reason not to have all the things the posh people have got.

Another tweet made reference to the fact that Dixons and Currys have been emptied whilst Waterstones retains a full inventory. Waterstones would have been the first place I'd have competed in Urban Supermarket Sweep!

Amongst the rolling footage of young men running amok, vox pops and talking heads called for the water cannons, rubber bullets, Marital Law (it's like Martial Law but your missus shouts you into submission) and the decommission of Twitter and BlackBerry Messenger.

Blaming Facebook, Twitter and BlackBerry Messenger is quite possibly the most laughable jerk of the knee possible. You may as well go after conversation or the spoken word! These very same things kept people informed of their friends/families health and whereabouts, and were also a valuable conduit when gauging public opinion and even organising clean up crews.

There are many simple answers to these problems that are anything but simple. Blame can be laid everywhere. Every government since the second World War is to blame. The police are to blame. The media are to blame. Social networking is to blame. The parents are to blame.

For those that were brazen enough to act up in front of startlingly high quality CCTV, they will be found, dragged in front of the beak and the blame will be laid squarely at their feet. To those on the right, this is only right. To those on the left, this is kind of sort of right but shouldn't we look at the whys and the wherefores of what led this poor child to do such a thing before condemning them?

Both sides have a point but at the end of the day and in the eyes of the law, it doesn't matter who loaded the gun, just who fired the bullets.

What has happened, has happened and when this thing finally peters out and the last broken pane of glass has been replaced, the autopsy will begin in earnest and it will still go against the average man who pays the bills, obeys the law and gets on with the job of getting on with the job.

Dick Puddlecoat Pretty Much Nails It

2011-08-10T01:24:00.000+01:00

Dick has this to say:

Stop With The Angry Stuff, Already

[...]But please, please, please can we stop hearing this crap about anger being a cause?

Prize bell end Livingstone gave us one example last night, while David Bond of the BBC talks of next year's Olympics being fairly safe since "They are unlikely to see the IOC or London 2012 as a target for their anger and frustration".

Anger?

Is there anger in the giggles and "it's fun, dough" jumbled mess spouted by the two Croydon bints? Course not. Nor did Maurice MacLeod - who is impeccably qualified to comment (do read the whole piece) - notice any last night in Clapham.

This was not the modern-day version of the Toxteth or Brixton rioters. These were just opportunistic young people, looking as if they were having the time of their lives.

What was also strangely absent, especially watching the coverage of other areas, was anger or even a feeling of danger. The mood was more like a street party without the music. The looters and the onlookers were both stunned that this was being allowed to continue.

There's no anger. It's not some inevitable consequence of inequality as predicted in Wilkinson and Pickett's fiction novel, like at least one idiot MP tweeted this morning. Nor is rioting orchestrated via Blackberries and iPhone Twitter apps a symptom of poverty in London.

Stop making psychobabble excuses, already. It's vandalism, criminal damage, theft and commonplace thuggery, but with a profit motive.

When a mob is truly angry, the last thing they want to do is snaffle a couple of trackies from JD Sports.

Angry, my marshmallow arse!

You're not wrong Dick. In the words retweeted by Angelos Epithemiou in his rapawaytehriots on twitter: "@no_left_feet The thieving scum have no political agenda, they just wanna own the latest nintenda #rapawaytheriots"

Funny and true all in one hit!

I don't think I can recommend this blog by a serving Police Inspector; Inspector Gadget's Wasting Police Time, enough.

If you haven't read it before, it's well worth a scroll through. A decent man who has served his country in the army, gone on to the police force and has seen the salami slicing of the Peel Principles into what we have seen these past four nights.

Ever almost want someone to mess with your stuff?

2011-08-09T21:04:00.001+01:00

That was this afternoon in my town and it's now starting to get dark. The corner shop and the chemist at the end of my road were shut, the big supermarket too. It was really quiet on the roads when I got into Wolves and there were quite a few groups of young lads around. A mate I play cricket with told me he saw riot police in the town charge a group of a few hundred "hoodies". I've no reason to disbelieve him.

Asda was also closed and under guard due to large group of yobs.

There were a load of bricks and large rocks out the front of ours so I took a couple of Ibruprofen (pulled a muscle in my back earlier) and me and my housemate shifted them into the alley by our house, put the bins, a pallet and a wheelbarrow in there and bolted the gate.

I hope to fuck my car is still outside tomorrow.

It's eerie out there. There's normally a load of traffic on my road and it's really quiet. You can hear the odd shouts and chants and the sirens too.

Hello Guinness! There you are!

Don't worry, we'll be fine here. We have 3 sets of golf clubs and 3 cricket bats. I don't know how many bullets that is but I reckon we've got enough ammo.

Love you XXXXXXXXX

Missed The Bus On This One

2011-07-31T11:36:00.000+01:00

As I was making my way back from the corner shop, struggling with a full bag of White Lightning, frozen pizzas and twenty Mayfair, well, when in Rome and all that, I saw one of Wolverhampton's buses pass by my street.

Shiny

Emblazoned on the back of the bus was the slogan “Catch it, ride it, love it.”

No, I am not making this up. Somebody came up with that slogan, it was approved by someone else and then it was slapped up in 5 foot high lettering on the back of buses across Wolverhampton, where everybody could see this moron's handy work. Much like a toddler showing off his latest deposit in the potty.

At this point I could go off on a rant calling for the cull of marketing departments everywhere, making particular reference to certain abusers of the nation's attention spans, but I already did that here.

I did want to know who the hell came up with that slogan, purely so I could do that,internet thing of slinging anonymous vitriol. I googled “Catch it ride it love it” and I came to the twitter page of Travel_WM, which appears to be the twitter page of Travel West Midlands, the people who run the buses in Wolves.

The tweet ran thus:

Travel_WM Travel WM Help
"catch it, ride it, love it" - wasn't anyone in our office's idea for a slogan, let me tell you that much! #soundslikehorsesex
11 Feb

This did not look like the average corporate Twitter page. I'm pretty sure that slagging off approved slogans was not toeing the company line. I scrolled through:

Travel_WM Travel WM Help
We'd like to apologise for disruptions in sevices today. The council rented half the roads out to sky tv without telling us!
12 Sep

Travel_WM Travel WM Help @
@Kathryn_Rushe Don't have a go at us love, we only got told about it yesterday!
12 Sep

Travel_WM Travel WM Help
ALTHOUGH disruptions to lines going south from Moor Street Station are still in effect. There are Rail Replacement Buses running from. certain stations at random intervals (tho i heard they were reserve drivers, and lets just say, they're not the most safety-conscious!)

Travel_WM Travel WM Help
There's been a lot of bad publicity over the child hit by a No. 6 in Hall Green. Sorry, but really, how can you not see a bus coming?

Travel_WM Travel WM Help
@stanley_wells Drivers aren't responsible for the safety of non-passengers. He said it was an accident and we believe him, he's a nice guy!

Travel_WM Travel WM Help @
@stanley_wells My point is its clearly the childs fault for walking in front of our bus. Or the parents for raising an idiot, who knows

Travel_WM Travel WM Help
@ipswichbuses Hey, crazy idea, do you guys fancy a race sometime? We could get some charity involved, make an event out of it...

Travel_WM Travel WM Help @
@ipswichbuses Are you refusinng our offer of a race then? Is it cos you know our buses are faster?

Travel_WM Travel WM Help
Hey everybody, @ipswichbuses are too chicken to race us. So we win by default. Pakaaawk!

Travel_WM Travel WM Help
Tired of scary black people, scruffy gypsies, the lingering weed smell on the No. 11? Join our "Be A Grass"campaign http://is.gd/f92Ap

His last tweet was 5 months ago, which is a bloody shame as the new bus station in Wolves cost 22.5 million pounds, shut down the ring road for great lengths of time and is under no small amount of fire some fire from the bus using public.

Apparently, whilst the new bus station is nice and shiny and a lovely experience for all who use it, the travel authorities have stopped a lot of the buses from actually using it. Services that used to terminate at the station, which is about 500 yards from the train station, now terminate in the city center, making catching the train a bit more of a chore.

It has also been suggested that the services that have been prevented from starting and finishing at the station, serve the less salubrious parts of the city and is the bus company's attempt at keeping the new bus station all shiny, new and free of scary looking passengers.

I think @Travel_WM would have had some great sport with this.

Owner Of A Broken Heart

2011-07-25T21:02:00.000+01:00

Lads, if you ever needed to know how to win back your girl, this is it. The close ups will seal the deal and make her yours forever.

It doesn't make you a complete loser with no nads. Not even a little bit.

Jesus Wept.

Anonymous Message To NATO

2011-07-16T13:40:00.001+01:00

I don't know anything about their effectiveness as a group or their skill-set, but if you take out the implied threat from the press release below, nothing is actually threatened after all, I quite like it as an anti-corruption polemic.

Greetings, members of NATO. We are Anonymous.

In a recent publication, you have singled out Anonymous as a threat to "government and the people". You have also alleged that secrecy is a 'necessary evil' and that transparency is npt always the right way forward.

Anonymous would like to remind you that the government and the people are, contrary to the supposed foundations of "democracy", distinct entities with often conflicting goals and desires. It is Anonymous' position that when there is a conflict of interest between the government and the people, it is the people's will which must take priority. The only threat transparency poses to government is to threaten government's ability to act in a manner which the people would disagree with, without having to face democratic consequences and accountability for such behaviour. Your own report cites a perfect example of this, the Anonymous attack on HBGary. Whether HBGary were acting in the cause of security or military gain is irrelevant - their actions were illegal and morally reprehensible. Anonymous does not accept that the government and/or the military has the right to be above the law and to use the phoney cliche of "national security" to justify illegal and deceptive activities. If the government must break the rules, they must also be willing to accept the democratic consequences of this at the ballot box.We do not accept the current status quo whereby a government can tell one story to the people and another in private. Dishonesty and secrecy totally undermine the concept of self rule. How can the people judge for whom to vote unless they are fully aware of what policies said politicians are actually pursuing?

When a government is elected, it is said to "represent" the nation it governs. This essentially means that the actions of a government are not the actions of the people in government, but are actions taken on behalf of every citizen in that country. It is unacceptable to have a situation in which the people are, in many cases, totally and utterly unaware of what is being said and done on their behalf - behind closed doors.

Anonymous and WikiLeaks are distinct entities. The actions of Anonymous were not aided or even requested by WikiLeaks. However, Anonymous and WikiLeaks do share one common attribute: They are no threat to any organization - unless that organization is doing something wrong and attempting to get away with it.

We do not wish to threaten anybody's way of life. We do not wish to dictate anything to anybody. We do not wish to terrorize any nation.

We merely wish to remove power from vested interests and return it to the people - who, in a democracy, it should never have been taken from in the first place.
The government makes the law. This does not give them the right to break it. If the government was doing nothing underhand or illegal, there would be nothing "embarassing" about Wikileaks revelations, nor would there have been any scandal emanating from HBGary. The resulting scandals were not a result of Anonymous' or Wikileaks' revelations, they were the result of the CONTENT of those revelations. And responsibility for that content can be laid solely at the doorstep of policymakers who, like any corrupt entity, naively believed that they were above the law and that they would not be caught.

A lot of government and corporate comment has been dedicated to "how we can avoid a similar leak in the future". Such advice ranges from better security, to lower levels of clearance, from harsher penalties for whistleblowers, to censorship of the press.

Our message is simple: Do not lie to the people and you won't have to worry about your lies being exposed. Do not make corrupt deals and you won't have to worry about your corruption being laid bare. Do not break the rules and you won't have to worry about getting in trouble for it.

Do not attempt to repair your two faces by concealing one of them. Instead, try having only one face - an honest, open and democratic one.

You know you do not fear us because we are a threat to society. You fear us because we are a threat to the established hierarchy. Anonymous has proven over the last several years that a hierarchy is not necessary in order to achieve great progress - perhaps what you truly fear in us, is the realization of your own irrelevance in an age which has outgrown its reliance on you. Your true terror is not in a collective of activists, but in the fact that you and everything you stand for have, by the changing tides and the advancement of technology, are now surplus to requirements.

Finally, do not make the mistake of challenging Anonymous. Do not make the mistake of believing you can behead a headless snake. If you slice off one head of Hydra, ten more heads will grow in its place. If you cut down one Anon, ten more will join us purely out of anger at your trampling of dissent.

Your only chance of defeating the movement which binds all of us is to accept it. This is no longer your world. It is our world - the people's world.

We are Anonymous.
We are legion.
We do not forgive.
We do not forget.
Expect us...

Those little buggers eh?

The Middle Lane, Not Just For Morons Anymore

2011-07-16T06:00:00.002+01:00

I'm not always filled with rage, hate, piss and vinegar. Sometimes I like to give to charity, stroke puppies and teach children the finer points of smoking cigarettes, such as how to not bumsuck a fag.

Trust me, not bumsucking is important.

If you ever want to guarantee a good old spot of Carter rage, then I suggest you wait until I am behind the wheel of car, traveling on one of her Majesty's motorways and then sit in the middle lane without recourse to the left hand one. I see this behaviour an awful lot on the roads and it never fails to generate an instant hatred of the dizzy bastard willfully flouting the Keep Left rule.

Die. Just Die.

So, what can one do? Can I ram them into the left hand lane where they should be? Can I undertake whilst leaning on the horn and giving them the Kenco coffee beans sign? Perhaps a civil flash of the lights to let them know that I am behind them and they appear to be impeding the progress of other motorway users would do the trick.

These particular methods of education, whilst entirely justified, are frowned upon by the Dibble. I think this is because the methods have a low success rate. I mean, it's one on one teaching but the chances of getting through to people that have clearly had all common sense removed, well, it's just not going to happen is it.

Whenever I have mentioned this topic, and I do mention it frequently, I can't recall a single one of my friends, young or old, disagreeing with me. This may be because I have selective hearing but I like to think that I have chosen my friends wisely.

Back in September, I wrote this:

Some things in life are obvious. So damn obvious in fact, that they shouldn't require taxpayer funded poster, leaflet and pamphlet drives accompanied by multiple television adverts to highlight the issues.

The "Think Bike" campaign has to be one of the most egregious examples of this bearsshitinthwoodedness that is paid for by us.

If you ride a bike you are vulnerable, so beware of cars, lorries and other traffic. They may not see you because you are smaller, faster and can get through gaps that other vehicles can't. Drivers of vehicles with four wheels need to be aware that motorcyclists own the roads and don't have to observe such niceties as speed limits and not undertaking.

Hardly requires state sponsered education to learn that, does it now?

I can't help but think that money would be better spent on advertising the benefits of the left hand lane to those that are obviously scared of it. A simple lorry trailer advertising campaign which actively encourages violence to the middle lane hoggers would do me nicely.

Justifiable Homicide

2011-07-12T14:19:00.003+01:00

There are times that I could happily reach out my hands and throttle the person in front of me. The reasons for this can be their stubbornly held belief that they are right despite having an opinion contrary to mine, or it could just be that they are in my way. The majority of the time, I’m angry at the person because they are in my way.

I wouldn’t say I was a particularly rapid person, I certainly don’t like to hang around, even if this doesn’t translate directly to my fielding capabilities in Cricket. However, when there is someone plodding or dawdling in front of me, I tend to begin the process of plotting their demise.

Whenever a car pulls out in front of me and insists on doing 10mph less than the speed limit, whilst taking their dear sweet time getting there, I will start to froth at the mouth. These are the same selfish swine that sit in the middle lanes of motorways who get upset when you blast past them on the inside lane just to show them where it is.

These people should be shot along with their children and never allowed to breed.

Watching someone trying to do a simple operation on my computer, copying and pasting using a mouse instead of hitting CTRL+C and CRTL+V for example, can set my foot tapping and knee jiggling without much time having passed. I also find that when I use someone else’s PC they invariably have the mouse speed set to excruciatingly slow and this too will make my insides go all itchy, signalling the onset of a raging fury.

Dozy bar staff really get on my nerves too as I don’t believe that there is any need for it. I don’t want to get all “back in my day” on you, but I will. I used to work behind a bar and the till was as basic as basic could be, yet this didn’t stop me from serving up to three customers at once, getting their drinks right and handing out the correct change. It’s rare I go to a pub these days but I’ve seen a man wait 5 minutes for a pint in a near empty pub, even though there was a girl behind the ramp.

Have you ever watched someone who isn’t very good at computer games play Sonic or Super Mario? It’s like fingernails down the chalkboard of my spine when they lose 5 lives in quick succession on the second level.

“PRESS B YOU MORON! PRESS B!!!”

“Alright son, there’s no need to talk to your Nan like that.”

Will you look at that, there’s a whole page worth of print above this line and all it’s done is confirm that I’m psychotic. I’m generally alright but I really, really, really don’t like to be kept waiting because the person in front of me is too slow witted to drive a car at the national speed limit, or they don’t have the ability to remember why they went in to the bank and queue for twenty minutes

I especially find it hard to contain my exasperation and disgust at some of the mouth breathers I have seen attempt to use a self service checkout. If you feel that you may be a bit thick then do the world a favour and use the staffed checkout. The person on the till may be your cousin/sister but they have at least been trained in the art of barcode detection.

I’m finding it harder and harder to contain my anger at the slower witted people of the world. On Sunday I was playing golf with the Housemate Masher. We were only playing 9 holes and we started of with a clear course in front of us. By the time we had reached the 4th hole, we had caught up with the fourball in front of us. They didn’t seem to be playing too slowly and we didn’t mind waiting an extra minute or two before teeing off again. The next hole was a lot slower and when we reached the tee for the 7th, the fourball were waiting to tee off because of the father and son combo in front of them.

There was nobody on front of the two people on the green but they were playing so badly and soooooooo slowly that they were holding up 6 other golfers after only 6 holes. This soon turned into 8 as another pair joined us. The son looked like he was the picked on type; short, dumpy, glasses and so very, very, very slow. He took many practices swings, all with the grace of an out of control Chinnook but much, much, much slower.

The father was obviously mentally challenged. You do not take your child on to a proper golf course unless he can play. There are much cheaper pitch and putt courses that cater for the lower skilled golfer. I mean, why bother attempting a 500 plus yard par 5 hole if you can’t hit it no more than 20 feet off the tee?

As we advanced up the 7th hole, we could see the genetically challenged offspring of Jethro and Jethrine coming back towards us as they slooooooowly made their way up the 8th. They had not a care in the world, were completely impervious to the vitriol and bad juju being sent their way by all that were being held up.

I understand that it’s a big old world and being kind to those less fortunate is what marks the human species out as, well, human! I have to ask though, if I had taken my 4 iron and did for the pair of them, in a manner that would have seen me set for drinks for the rest of my life from the blokes in the fourball alone, would anyone really miss them?

The next time I see someone at the petrol station who doesn’t understand that the petrol hoses reach both sides of the car, or doesn’t seem to notice or care that other people are waiting, would the world really give a crap if I increased the overall productivity of the country by wringing his moronic neck?

Aren’t there enough people in the world? Surely a quick purge of the terminally ignorant would help the world?

Centre lane only drivers on the motorway. Gone.

40mph drivers on national speed limit roads. Gone.

Chavs with loaded shopping trolleys clogging up the self service or express checkouts. Gone.

People who stand in groups in the middle of the pavement. Gone.

That moron on his mobile phone in the cinema. Hung from the Town hall by his shoelaces with his Nokia slammed up his back passage. He may still be present as as an example to others but essentially, he’s gone.

Britain’s Got Talent. Gone.

Piers Morgan. Gone, but most definitely dispatched in a painful way.

Dear World. Give me the chance to do some good. Let me be the judge, jury and executioner that the normal people are crying out for.

Let transgressions against Carter’s Law be a capital offense.

I saw this on my way to work this morning

2011-07-12T10:26:00.000+01:00

What a moron.

Meritforce Doorstep Collection Agents

2011-07-09T12:16:00.002+01:00

The post that follows is one of the most visited posts on my blog and was originally posted on 23rd September 2010. People google "Meritforce" because they have received a letter in the post claiming that they owe money. What often happens is that the recipient of the letter will then phone Meritforce because they don't recognise the debt and Meritforce will strong arm them into a payment plan, despite the fact that the debt never existed in the first place and was completely fabricated.

If you're here for that reason then please read on. I try to be a bit funny and sarcastic but I would like to think that the advice I do give in this post, is 100% clear:

Meritforce are con artists
DO NOT contact them
Contact the Office of Fair Trading and let them know, clearly and concisely, what you've been threatened with.
Being a working person in Britain today is fraught with money worries, don't let these crooked bastards steal from you and make it even harder.

Enjoy the original post.

Carter Magna

Unlike me, the Landlord, formally Flatmate, Masher isn't daft when it comes to cash. He has also never had any dealings with 3 Mobile. You may wonder why I felt the need to include that tidbit as there will also be many of you that have never had any dealings with 3 Mobile. Well the reason is simple yet straight out of left field.

Today Masher received a letter from a firm called Meritforce stating that he owed nearly a grand to 3 Mobile, a firm called Lowell Portfolio 1 Limited were pursuing the debt and Meritforce Doorstep Collection Agents were going to pay a visit in the next ten days.

Not just any visit, but an AUTHORISED COLLECTION VISIT.

Hmmmmm. Time for the modern day superhero to shed some light on this: Googleman.

As per usual, Googleman gives it the beans and shows that Meritforce (also known as Mackenzie Hall) have much form. So I've read, the debt has often never existed in the first place and they are reliant on gullible people paying up because they're scared.

The money saving forums and other sites suggest a particular template to deal with these chancers and I shall include it here if you've happened across this post because you're being harangued too:

Mr M Ark
Carter Towers,
Wolverhampton
WV3 XXX
23/09/2010

Meritforce,
Unit 2B,
Portland Street,
Kilmarnock,
KA1 1JG

Dear Sir/Madam

Ref: xxxxxxxxxxx

You have contacted us regarding the account with the above reference number, which you claim is owed by ourselves.

We would point out that we have no knowledge of any such debt being owed to The Loan Company.

We are familiar with the ‘Office of Fair Trading Debt Collection Guidance’ which states that it is unfair to send demands for payment to an individual when it is uncertain that they are the debtor in question.

We would also point out that the OFT say under the Guidance that it is unfair to pursue third parties for payment when they are not liable. In not ceasing collection activity whilst investigating a reasonably queried or disputed debt you are using deceptive/and or unfair methods.

Furthermore, ignoring and/or disregarding claims that debts have been settled or are disputed and continuing to make unjustified demands for payment amounts to physical/psychological harassment.

We would ask that no further contact be made concerning the above accounts unless you can provide evidence as to our liability for the debt in question.

Furthermore, should it be your intention to arrange a “doorstep call”, please be advised that under OFT rules, you can only visit me at my home if you make an appointment and I have no wish to make an appointment with you.

There is only an implied license under English Common Law for people to be able to visit me on my property without express permission; the postman and people asking for directions etc (Armstrong v. Sheppard and Short Ltd [1959] 2 Q.B. per Lord Evershed M.R.).

Therefore take note that I revoke license under Common Law for you, or your representatives to visit me at my property and if you do so, then you will be liable to damages for a tort of trespass and action will be taken, including but not limited to, police attendance.

We also notice the OFT have recently placed requirements on Mackenzie Hall Ltd. Specifically, that they/you and all connected companies cease collection activity and enforcement while any debt remains queried or disputed. Should you ignore this requirement, a complaint with the OFT and other regulatory bodies will be raised.

We await your written confirmation that this matter is now closed. Otherwise we will have no option but to make a complaint to the trading standards department and consider informing the OFT of your actions.

We look forward to your reply.

Yours faithfully

Mr GotAnInterwebsConnectionAndIsHipToGoogleY'All

I can understand why people would feel the need to write or ring these people to sort out the obvious mistake. My advice though, and I'm no expert mind, is to give them a damn good ignoring.

Seriously.

You doubt me? That would be very wise of you as this is but a crappy blog on that there interpants after all. Before you do dismiss me out of hand, have another look at that letter that Meritforce have sent you, if that's why you are here. Most decent companies send out letters with a printed letterhead on watermarked paper, is that the case here? Are there any details that you recognise? Have you been contacted by the pursuers before and, most importantly, do you actually owe them any money?

They're fishing so do yourself a favour and ignore them. If they do come round, tell them to do one and if they don't bugger off, call the dibble.

As a little piece of retribution, and as much as I would like to offer these chancers a Chard Slap followed by a Snake Back Break Move, I can only offer the following:

mackenzie@meritforce.co.uk

complaints@meritforce.co.uk

Well, the last time I published an e-mail address on here this happened. I can only hope the lovely chaps at Meritforce get descended upon with lots of spam too.

UPDATE

I'm getting a lot of visits because of people googling Meritforce, presumably because they've also had threatening letters for no reason. If this is the reason you're here, leave a comment and let us know what your experience with them is.

UPDATE Number 2:

This post was written and uploaded on the 23rd of September 2010. It is now April 2011. If these muppets were going to knock on our door, they would have done so by now. We haven't had a single follow up letter and Masher swears blind that he has never even thought about getting a mobile phone with Three Mobile.

Do yourself a favour; if you don't recognise the alleged debt, do not contact Meritforce. They're chancing their arm.

Saw Mark Steel on Soccer AM

2011-07-09T10:59:00.000+01:00

And they talked about this:

Well worth listening to if you're a cricket fan.

These sums are wrong

2011-07-06T13:45:00.001+01:00

There are lots of fat people in the country. This generally occurs because the fat person is eating more food than they need to. It’s not rocket science.

There is also the small matter of worse health due to being a person of size. This ends up costing the NHS, basically the taxpayer, money. In a stunning little headline grabber, some unnamed “Health Boss”, whatever a health boss is, has suggested that overweight people of all ages be given slimming shakes and diet food. This, the reasoning goes, will save the NHS money in the long term and will be cheaper than gastric bands and the like.

If these slimming aids, or as I like to call it other types of food, are to be given to the chubby chaps and chappesses, what exactly are the recipients going to contribute in this deal?

You could argue that they contribute by not being a drain on the NHS in later life. If you did argue this, it would mark you out as a bit of a moron. People don’t get fat without eating food. Lots and lots of food. If I wanted to lose a few inches off my waistline there are two ways I could do this; eat less and do more. Eating less is cheaper than eating more. Why aren’t the slimmers themselves paying for the very special diet food out of the surplus they have in their pockets by not stocking up on Findus Crispy Pancakes?

A Pure Two Minutes Of Spoiler

2011-07-05T22:10:00.000+01:00

I have just seen the trailer for the new film "The Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes." It looks very, very good. The CGI looks like very special effects and despite the meager 2 minutes and 18 seconds of film, you could easily imagine having strong feelings for that first clever monkey.

Here's the trailer.

Impressive, isn't it?

That short trailer shows that this film has all of the elements required to make it a smash. The only problem for me is that I can't help but feel that I don't need to see it now. The whole damn plot has been revealed to me in that one trailer. Why would I want to spend money on watching it all play out in slow time, whilst there are videos of Clara Morgane on the Internet that I can watch for free?

Better toss a coin I suppose. Yes. I said coin...

There is absolutely nothing left to the imagination. Some scientists are looking for a cure for Alzheimer's and are testing on animals. They have a breakthrough and one of their test subjects, a chimp, becomes extremely bright, has a baby chimp who also has an intelligence on a par with a human for its age. People get scared, treat the chimp like shit, the chimp rebels with its chimp strength enhanced by its supercharged evolving brain and liberates the rest of the monkey world by turning the Human's Alzheimer's research against them.

*sigh* The Human domain is over run and the Monkeys take over, enslaving their Human overlords.

Please Hollywood, you've been doing this for years. Isn't it about time you credit us with some intelligence and let us actually watch the film before blurting out the entire plot?

I've got your facebook profile

2011-07-02T10:43:00.001+01:00

I don't mind constructive criticism, truly, I don't. If you're going to give me grief then I suggest you play it a little cooler than you have been doing.

Here is my response http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?=743264506

I know who you are.

Beware The Online Banker

2011-06-18T19:53:00.002+01:00

A little while back, I was attempting to alleviate the amount of debt on my manly, yet young, shoulders using a method known as the Mule Card Technique. This transfer was successful and now, whilst I'm still in debt, I'm not getting charged a bung load of interest every month. So long as I keep to the contract by making regular payments... *gulp*

This meant that my mate Hedgetrimmer transferred the money into my account. He'd recently watched Lock, Stock & 2 Smoking Barrels. Scroll forward to 2:25 and listen to the character Tom's idea.

Hedgetrimmer facilitated an online money transfer into my account and I think you can see where this is going. He named the transaction "BALL TICKLER REFUND" and I thought it was brilliant.

So anyway, yesterday I was in the bank going over some changes to my account. In the office were myself and a lady in her fifties who was the Account Advisor. She had my account on screen and, this may seem a strange aside but, have you ever noticed that the banking computer system's screen style is very old fashioned, yet exceptionally easy to read?

BALL TICKLER REFUND

I'm pretty certain that this lady was a fully trained member of the playing minesweeper in office time brigade. She clicked that off of the screen quicker than I could throw up a little in my mouth.

I sat there going red, I tried to laugh it off by saying "Oh yes, hahaha, that Hedgetrimmer has quite the sense of humour! hahahaha! I'll get him back by calling the payment for V Festival ticket "Crack Deal #94" or something! Hahahaha!"

The meeting soon ended.

It Probably Wasn't

2011-06-15T15:24:00.001+01:00

In 1986, Mkele Mbembe was on holiday in Kenya after graduating from college. On a hike through the bush, he came across a young bull elephant standing with one leg raised in the air.

The elephant seemed distressed so Mbembe approached it very carefully. He got down on one knee and inspected the elephant's foot, and found a large thorn deeply embedded in it. As carefully and as gently as he could, Mbembe worked the thorn out with his hunting knife, after which the elephant gingerly put down its foot. The elephant turned to face the man and with a rather stern look on its face, stared at him.

For several tense moments Mbembe stood frozen, thinking of nothing else but being trampled. Eventually the elephant trumpeted loudly, turned and walked away. Mbembe never forgot that elephant or the amazing events of that day.

Twenty years later he was walking through a zoo with his teenaged son. As they approached the elephant enclosure, one of the creatures turned and walked over to near where Mbembe and his son Tapu were standing.

The large bull elephant stared at Mbembe and lifted its front foot off the ground, then put it down. The elephant did that several times then trumpeted loudly, all the while staring at the man. Remembering the encounter in 1986, Mbembe couldn't help but wonder if this was the same elephant.

Mbembe summoned up his courage, climbed over the railing and made his way into the enclosure. He walked right up to the elephant and stared back in wonder. Suddenly the elephant trumpeted again, wrapped its trunk around one of the man's legs and swung him wildly back and forth along the railing, killing him.

Probably wasn't the same elephant.

Moggies of Malvern

2011-06-13T17:10:00.001+01:00

Once upon a time in Malvern, a man called Morrison decided to build a shop. This shop would would be in a handy location, have a big car park, a petrol station and be advertised on the telly by people who pay people to shop for them.

Because the majority of shoppers in Malvern are disabled or pregnant, the allocation of car parking near the front door would reflect this. Fortunately, Malvern is also choc full of chavvy goodness; morons in Polyfilla full MkII Ford Fiestas and boy racered out Citroen Saxos, stand up to this oppression by parking at awkward angles in the drop off point. This ensures that they don't have to walk too far to the hole in the wall, aiding their journey to obesity and a guaranteed parking slot.

Moggies of Malvern is a strange old place. Over the last 5 years of getting my lunch here, I've seen people with at least 16 items try to use the self service checkout, people with less than 16 items try to use the self service checkout but without a basic understanding of barcodes, menu navigation and weight measurement, an ordinary looking man using a trolley for a paltry two loaves of bread and other stunning examples of Jesus Weptery that really are too depressing to recount.

The petrol station can tell you everything you need to know about modern life; everyone except for me (and a small handful of others), is a moron. Waiting for a pump to become available is positively painful and I have no idea, apart from my the world is full of idiots theory, why this should be.
Now, I'll admit that I do use the petrol station at least twice a week. Maybe that qualifies me as something of an expert in the field? I mean, it must be quite difficult to remember certain things about your own car. Is it a petrol or a diesel? Is the filler cap on the driver's or the passenger's side? Is the filler cap protected by a key or is there a button hidden away in plain view on the dashboard?

It must be a big ask. Personally, I don't think it is but I cannot deny the evidence of my own eyes as, twice a week, the comedy of f***wittery is laid out before me.

The fabled Rover 218i is very slowly manoeuvred to the pump, making sure that the filler cap is on the correct side, this despite the fact that there is an available pump not 7 foot away and the hose will happily reach the other side of the car. The driver will then get out, peer myopically at the choice of diesel, diesel or unleaded, ponder which one he needs before selecting the appropriate juice.

Honestly, I see it all the time. It's as if they've never been to a petrol station before! How the hell can this be?!

I can't even be bothered to tell you about their adventures with the car wash, air machine or vac.

I swear blind that the time for the Zombie Apocalypse can not can soon enough. For the customers of the Moggies in Malvern, it will represent a marked improvement in their IQs.

Not Sussed This One Yet

2011-06-10T10:12:00.001+01:00

The car in front is a Rover/Volvo/Micra/Fiesta and there is a child on board sticker/tartan blanket/trilby hat visible through their rear view mirror.

Why, when they are in a car on a single carriageway, which is governed by a sign that's a white circle with a black diagonal slash which means 60mph for said vehicle, are they travelling at 40mph? Why then, when safety is obviously paramount to this mouth breathing entity, do they continue to travel at 40mph when the enter a 30mph zone?

Just seems a touch odd.

I Want This Machine

2011-06-04T09:49:00.000+01:00

After watching the visit counter go through the roof yesterday, I was most put out. I've been writing this blog for nearly three years and the hits have flowed on only a few posts. To receive the most visits I've ever received on one post, for a subject that I can't stand, well. It just plain peed me off.

So much so, I want to build one of these, crawl into it and hide.

Britain's Got Talent can kiss my source code.

BRITAIN'S GOT TALENT and the RONAN PARKE CONNECTION

2011-06-02T21:10:00.001+01:00

Out of nothing more than a bit of spite, I'm reposting this that I found here after it was deleted from www.justpaste.it which was replaced by this:

Before you read it, I would like to add that I really couldn't give a toss and if I've been successfully trolled, then so be it.

For reasons which will become obvious, I can't reveal my full identity. But let me just say that, I am an executive with Sony Music UK with many years experience in music mangement. My work involves close liasion with Simon Cowell's SYCO company (specifically SYCO Music and SYCO TV) and, as a result, I have seen what goes on from the inside and this has left me increasingly uncomfortable about the integrity of Britain's Got Talent and particularly the workings of SYCO.

It's long been known that there is a quite a degree of "fixing" in BGT. ( Daily Mail http://bit.ly/fxkWne ) But press reports on "fixing" are only the tip pf the iceberg when it comes to SYCO's manipulation of, not only the show and the contestants, but also the viewing public and hopefully, in this email, I can shine some light on the smoke and mirrors trickery of SYCO.

Take BGT 2011 for example. Scouts working for SYCO first saw Ronan Parke (the 12 year old singer) some two years ago when he was just 10 and was singing at a birthday party for former Norwich City goal-keeper, Bryan Gunn. Following that, Ronan was privately auditioned by SYCO scouts on two more occasions and, as is usual practice on BGT, he was "invited" to audition for the show as a "preferred" contestant. At the same time, Ronan and his parents were "required" to enter into a contract with SYCO. Like all SYCO contracts, it is heavily weighted in favour of the label and are notoriously bad, even in the cut-throat world of the music industry. Simon effectively signed Ronan for life and he's got little or no chance of ever getting out of it...unless Simon decides to terminate. Recording contracts are legally extremely complex and usually require input and advice from very expensive, specialist contract lawyers. SYCO knows that such legal advice goes well beyond the means of most contestants. As one senior SYCO executive said to me recently. "These people are mugs. They'll sign away their own mother just to get on tv. It's a ****ing turkey-shoot and then we own their arses!"

As is common for "invited" contestants that SYCO likes and have already signed, Ronan and his parents were provided with a car to drive them to the audition in London. These "invited" contestants don't have to queue up with everyone else, they don't go through the preliminary auditions with producers, but perform straight to Simon and the judging panel at a pre- arranged time-slot. And so it was for Ronan back in 2009 when he was just 10.

It was at this initial audition that I first met Ronan and he looked very different back then. He was a skinny, 10 year old lad who, even at that time, was a bit effeminate. His voice needed a bit of working on, but that wouldn't be a problem. Unfortunately, nerves got the better of Ronan and he was unable to perform. Simon however, had already seen the audition tapes from the scouts and took Ronan into an unused dressing room and got him to sing in there with his mum for support. Clearly Ronan was not going to be part of BGT in 2009 and nothing from this was ever televised.

Ordinarily, you would think that would be the end of things, but with Ronan already signed to SYCO, far from it. This was just the start of a two year grooming and manipulation process to prepare Ronan for stardom.

It's no big secret that Simon has been looking for an artist who could crack the very lucrative pre-teen market for some time, particularly in the US. If you like, he wanted his own rival to Bieber and, taking a leaf out of how professional football academies develop youngersters to feed their main team, Simon wanted his own singing academy and Ronan was just one of a number of identified youngsters, with whom SYCO intensively works with.

A development package, which included professional singing, dancing and stage-craft tuition was arranged for Ronan and the SYCO machine kicked into gear with the view of Ronan entering BGT 2010. Lots of work had been done with Ronan and his voice was much improved, unfortunately nerves were still a major issue for him and it was decided by SYCO not to enter him into the 2010 series.

At a following senior exec meeting at SYCO it was suggested that Ronan be dropped, but with Simon confident that he could be the kid he had been looking for, it was agreed that Ronan would receive "intensive support and input" to ready him for the 2011 series. Although Ronan's voice was now stunning, there were other major problems to be dealt with in order to sell him to the public. With respect to Ronan, he was nothing more than a cooky-looking, skinny runt of a kid and this was identified as a major handicap to sales.

It was agreed at a high-level, secret SYCO meeting, that if they were to do anything with Ronan, he needed totally restyling from the toes up. And so with time running out to develop Ronan into the star Simon wanted, SYCO went into overdrive. Ronan was even given speech and elocution training to rid him of his rural Norfolk accent, again in preparation for the potential US market. As for his effeminate and girlishness, this posed a bigger problem and resulted in many highly confidential meetings. At one of these meetings, the unthinkable was raised as a way forward....

Until now Ronan had been encouraged to "boy-up" and it was planned to present Ronan as an everyday skater-boy. But with his girliness still showing through, the image just wasn't believable. So a decision was taken to encourage and allow Ronan to "release" and enhance his campness . Disgustingly, SYCO planned to sexualise him. They were well aware of course, that if they sexualised a young girl to look sexually older than she is, all hell would let loose. But with Ronan, as one executive put it, "no one has ever seen a 'gay' kid before, it'll be a novelty." As for the pre-teen market, it was accepted they wouldn't care if Ronan appeared gay or not...most probably don't know what gay is anyway. And so, with a total gay- sexualisation of Ronan secretly planned, SYCO got to work. I should stress, Ronan's parents were not aware of any of this and were never consulted about Ronan's development or management. When I first met Ronan he was a bit effeminate in his ways, but nothing like the camp, girlie-giggling kid you see now on BGT and this is a direct result of SYCO's styling. Even his clothing worn at the audition and live semi-final were chosen for him by SYCO to match his new image.

SYCO took over everything to do with Ronan. His hairstyle, his clothes, his poise, giving tv interviews, you name it, Ronan was styled within an inch of his life and all on the promise of stardom, just as long as he worked hard and listened to his mentors. As for Ronan's parents they were constantly reassured that Simon was personally looking after Ronan and "it's all good".

And so to BGT 2011. With Ronan ready to be unveiled, SYCO bosses, under instructions from Simon did something not done in previous series of BGT; the winner of BGT 2011 was decided long before the first auditions took place and that winner HAD to be Ronan Parke. With Ronan now 12, he looked and sounded just as SYCO had planned, but time was running out. Soon Ronan would be going into puberty and his voice would eventually break, so BGT 2011 had to be the vehicle to launch Ronan's career; another year and as a singer he would probably be beyond any meaningful career and the opportunity will have been missed. With all this investment in Ronan, the production managers at SYCO TV are ready to deliver Ronan as ordered. Again, I need to stress, Ronan and his parents know nothing of this and have no idea Ronan will win BGT this weekend.

So far in the history of BGT and X-Factor, for that matter, no one has ever won who has not been an "invited or preferred" contestant, and it does sadden me that, all those thousands of people, lining up outside, often in the rain and cold, are basically wasting their time. The producers of BGT are not looking for the talented people, they aready have those. The reality is that the producers are hunting out oddities, freaks and, I'm ashamed to say, mentally ill people, to act as amusing fillers in the audition shows. They are nothing more than unpaid extras and they don't even qualify for traveling expenses! It's quite disgusting and shameful really, how the production team on BGT operate. People come from all over the country, often at great personal expense, because they think BGT is a talent competition and they stand a chance of realising their dreams. I can tell you from the inside that BGT is no more a "competition", than I am an astronaut. Nothing is left to chance on BGT, everything is micro-managed, choreographed, manipulated and planned down to the last detail including, the telephone voting.

The ability to manipulate viewers opinion is vital if you are to control telephone voting and indeed get the required result. SYCO see this as essential to the success of the show and are very open about fact; planning and delivering live shows of quality is impossible if it was purely left to the public vote. As Simon said in a meeting once. "The public NEED to be told who to vote for." Everything on BGT is geared towards telling you who you should for, particularly on the production side. It's an art really, which Simon has honed to perfection and SYCO are now world leaders at.

The micro-management of Ronan's audition performance was incredible. I was really quite shocked at his new image. From a starting point of wanting Ronan to look cute for the pre-teen market, SYCO had totally gayed him up in the process. Ronan's not a 16 year old expressing his sexualty for the first time, he's a 12 year old boy. It was horrible and I was very uncomfortable as to where this was going to end. Ronan, still suffering from nerves, performed his song and received a standing ovation from all three judges...why? Because it was in the script to give Ronan a standing ovation. As for Louis comment. "Ronan Parke. Remember that name. This kid's gonna be a star!!" - that was actually fed to him from the production gallery and I know the guy who wrote the line. And when it comes to Ronan's tears...well, check it out on YouTube or something. You see Ronan crying and wiping away tears. Only you don't see any actual tears, not even on close-up and on an HD tv. Yep you guessed it, even that was choreographed, right down to the lip-biting!

It was also interesting to see that even before the final credits rolled on Ronan's audition show, SYCO TV had uploaded the offical video of Ronan onto YouTube. Today, that particular video has been viewed over 2.5 million times and growing. SYCO don't do that for other contestants, so why Ronan? The gaying-up Ronan plan slightly backfired on SYCO when lots of negative comments were being posted on YouTube and Twitter about Ronan's image and the supposed sexuality that represents. Things got so bad on YouTube that the posting of comments had to be suspended. But SYCO learned from this and dressed Ronan more appropriately for his semi-final show; preferring a much more Bieber inspired look to the 'gay- kid' image presented in the audition.

In another unusal move for BGT contestants, SYCO created Ronan's Official Facebook Fan Page and Twitter account. Both these services are managed from within SYCO and they post messages and pictures, not Ronan. This is because they don't want Ronan posting anything controversial and is standard practice for currrent artists signed to SYCO.

And so this weekend will see Ronan crowned as winner of BGT 2011. Oh and let's not forget the £100k prize money. It's unlikely Ronan will see much or any of that. He's been signed to SYCO for two years now and under the terms of his contract, while SYCO stump-up for costs in advance, this is paid back from future earnings. So he will need to pay for all those lessons, coaches, cars, clothes, styling and management... I wouldn't be surprised even after winning BGT, if he is not still in debt to SYCO.

As a recording artist Ronan has a relatively short shelf-life. Simon knows he is going to have to hit the ground running to maximise Ronan's earning potential, particularly if they go ahead with a planned break into the States and the pace is going to be frantic for Ronan. If you think the music industry is bad in the UK, you haven't seen anything until you experience it Stateside. With an "anything goes" attitude all morals have long since gone out of the window. There will be no allowance for Ronan's age and he will be expected to perform on late- night shows and dinners etc. And if he get exhausted, there's always some sleaze-bag on hand ready to put a line of coke under his nose. I've seen it a million times.

I know for a fact, that the songs have already been chosen for Ronan's debut single and album, and that the backing and drum tracks have already been laid down.

Of course, once Ronan's voice breaks, it's game-over and he will be commercially redundant for a few years. By the time he gets through that, the world will have moved on and his fan-base will have grown-up a bit. Will he make a comeback? In my experience I'd say probably not.

I've met Ronan a few times over the past couple of years. He's a really nice kid with a generous, warm personality and the most wonderfully cute, girlie-giggle. There's nothing to not like about Ronan. He's a really sensitive soul and this comes across as him being a bit effeminate. But in a world of thuggish chavs, Ronan's a real breath of fresh air really and a real delight to chat to. Do I think Ronan's gay? No, is the short answer to that. SYCO have got a lot to answer for in their initial styling and image for Ronan. Like many 12 year old boys, Ronan may have issues in coming to terms with his sexuality in a couple of years. But right now, he's just a great kid...a bit different, I admit...but a great kid just the same.

I hope Ronan is not damaged by this experience, unforunately, history warns otherwise...but whatever, the genie is already out of the bottle and come this weekend, Ronan's life will change forever. Whether it's a good or bad experience being a 12 year old star in today's music industry, only time will tell. But as an industry insider I have serious reservations about what is about to happen to Ronan Parke and I doubt he or his family are ready for what's coming.

Thanks to my friends on Twitter and Facebook for getting this document out. Without you my voice would be silent.

** If you want to help expose the lie which is Britain's Got Talent, please feel free to republish this article or post a link to it http://justpaste.it/c8g

Anon
Sony Music UK

UPDATE:

After watching the visit counter go through the roof yesterday, because of this post, I was most put out. I've been writing this blog for nearly three years and the hits have flowed on only a few posts. To receive the most visits I've ever received on one post, for a subject that I can't stand, well. It just plain peed me off.

So much so, I want to build one of these, crawl into it and hide.

Britain's Got Talent can kiss my source code.

Carter's Law

2011-05-27T00:32:00.000+01:00

MPs create laws, it's their job. They create and amend laws that are supposed to protect each and every person in the country from being harmed, stolen from and mistreated. Given the bewildering complexity of modern life and human interaction, the number of laws, interpretation of laws, law practitioners and downright corrupt pieces of garbage in this country, it's no wonder that there are some pretty dumb ass rules out there.

Bear with me here, we're off on a meander down that there Memory Lane to try and lend some credibility to the blatantly obvious pub philosophy above.

When I was a young boy, I used to fish for roach, rudd, tench, skimmer bream, eels and whatever else would take a maggot on a size 18 barbless spade-end at Perry Street Pond. This required two licenses; one from Chard and District Angling club and one from the Water Authority, which was about 8 quid a year, a mere 16 weeks worth of be a good boy money. There was a little footbridge about 1 foot wide and 6 foot long, that you had to walk across to get to the pond. The name Noel Stonham was fashioned in white painted metal on the banister in memory of that young man. I never knew him but I knew his dad, Harry Stonham, when I stuck up skittles for him at Perry Street Club. At this entrance to the pond was a notice board that had sparse but important information.

The first time I fished there, I was 7 and my dad had brought me and my brother along. He set up his two carp rigs in one swim, then set up me and little brother with a 12 foot float rod with a Mitchell Match reel in the adjacent swim. Little brother wasn't too keen on this sitting around doing nothing lark and his first fishing trip was his last. I on the other hand actually caught some fish and was hooked, no pun intended. I caught 26 (yes I do remember the exact amount) roach and rudd and had hooked one eel, which Dad had to land for me because it was "a bit bloody strong Dad!"

My dog "Tinka" who was named after the Latin for Tench; tinca tinca, meaning "Red Eye" if I remember correctly. And I think I do.

To give the old boy his due, well, I say old boy, he was only 30 then! To give Dad his due, he'd set up my rod, which survived a whole day of me as a seven year old and caught some fish of his own. He hadn't fished for ten years yet he pulled four carp out that day, three of which were doubles and one of them was the Perry Street carp legend "Stumpy". I didn't see "Scaly" that day but I did see one of my uncles take him out a couple of years later.*

There was some serious Dad worship going on for me as a kid.

The last time I fished out Perry Street, I was 16. I caught bugger all and Warren Davies had tied all my string in knots. Warren nearly ended up in a watery grave that night as this was the string I used to tie my rods to my bike. As I cycled the 3 miles back to Chard, my two rods held on to the Diamond Back frame with much less string than I felt confident with, I wish I'd realised that it was the last time that I would fish there. I would like to think that I would have been quite sad and resolved to not let that happen, had I known.

But I didn't. I entered the sixth form at Holyrood the next day to study A-Level Maths, Physics, drinking and chasing skirt without another thought for the beautiful, peaceful and stress free existence that I was leaving behind.

At this point in time, I don't care if I catch anything or not

Occasionally, I would pop out to the pond when I was visiting Chard. Each time I visited the pond, the notice board at the entrance would be more cluttered. About a year ago, I noticed that even entering the pond as a non-member was verboten. As someone who used to fish those waters and had a soft spot for the place, I happily ignored this rule that obviously didn't apply to me.

I find myself doing that a lot, ignoring rules that I think shouldn't apply to me. Especially Health & Safety regulations that pertain to hard hats, high viz jackets and washing my hands after using the bathroom. What? I didn't piss on my hands.

The pond seemed much smaller than I remembered but then I was twice the height and five times the weight of little 7 year old me. I had a little amble round the pond, stopping at each swim to recall not catching fish in any of them and then I went to the pub feeling all nostalgic.

When I was last in the Shire for my Mum's birthday back in May, I went to take another slurp of allthiswasfields-ade by having a walk around the pond. The old bridge was in disrepair but still there. Beside it was a new bridge, which looked far more sturdy but way less of challenge to show off one's skill on a bike laden with fishing gear. In addition to the new bridge was a gate and the noticeboard loomed large on the other side of the gate and the narrow path. Whilst everything else about the pond seemed smaller than I remembered it, the noticeboard was bigger than ever and there was no mistaking its lack of welcome.

The list of rules spanned the length of the board and some of them completely threw me for a loop. There were some rules relating to specific fishing equipment and techniques, which were probably polarising issues for some members, that made sense, but the rest of them could have been slimmed down to just 4 words.

Anyone found defecating in or around any club water will receive a suspension from fishing club waters and probably a life ban.
The taking away of any fish is prohibited.
No litter to be left in swims.
Do not disturb or harm game, wildlife, plants or crops.
Do not remove, plant or transplant aquatic plants except during committee organised swim clearing.
No firearms.
No parking other than in designated areas.
Do not block or obstruct access routes.
Leave the Perry St. Pond car park by the Exit and not the No Exit.
No bicycles or motor cycles to be taken beyond the bridge at Perry Street Pond.
No bait to be taken to the bank in tin cans on any club controlled water.
No bait boats or dinghy’s. (sic)
No fishing between swims.
A suitably sized landing net must be used.

I don't know where the hell the taking bait in tin cans to the bank rule came from, or even the firearms ban, but surely the rest of the rules don't need to be there? Surely the four words "Don't be an asshole" would suffice?

If this were a Daily Mail article, this would be the part where I start lambasting Chard & District Angling Club for being petty and officious. Gladly for me, I'm not on the Daily Hate's payroll and I don't blame the CADAC one little bit for drawing up the rules they feel are necessary to protect their favourite place in the world.

At some point, tin cans were kicked into the pond, by accident of course, and they sank making getting them out a pain in the ass. Tupperware on the other hand, will float so retrieving it is easier and there's no danger of leaving metal in the pond. Why would there be a rule forbidding defecating in the pond if some absolute bastard hadn't done it in the past?

No. The club had to put these rules in print because morons had acted like, um, morons and used the two fingered excuse "there's no rule against it." In those situations, I want to scan the rules to see if they've left out the violence against those that absolutely need it rule.

Four words:

Don't be an asshole.

Why aren't these four words emblazoned above buildings and highways and tattooed on the inside of your eyelids? If you are unaware of of an entity called Britain, then I welcome you traveller. Please, take the weight of your feet, grab a soothing flagon of Gutrot's Old Snot Raker and I shall tell ye the tale of the tyrannical, police state that is Britain. A tale of Britain and its sinister left wing authoritarian propaganda machine, the British Broadcasting Corporation.

Britain is a part of the superstate of Scotland. I know this to be true because virtually every American guest I met at a wedding in New Jersey, asked me what part of Scotchland I was from. Britain's Scottitch masters, with their limitless supply of oil and Barnett Formula money, control everything from banning Father Christmas from primary schools, to forcing the Christians to let homosex enthusiasts hold hands in their B&Bs. Suppressing the masses with an ever dwindling police force armed with lethal weapons, lethal weapons such as an aluminium stick, a tin of pepper spray and strong language, the government controls all.

This came about despite MPs being charged with creating laws to protect each and every person in the country from being harmed, stolen from or mistreated. With the sheer amount of numbers and conflicting agendas, the commandments by which the Britons shall live are no longer carved in stone. They are no longer brought down from a steep hill by a dude so off his chops on mushrooms, he carved moral guidance in to stone with his bare hands because a burning bush told him to. They're printed on glossy posters in patronising terms and you have to pay for them.

I accept that the very thought of "Don't Be An Asshole" writ large against the skyline to guide the population, is naive in the extreme. Still, it's not a bad tenet to live one's life by. Is it?

Here be fish and fond memories

*I'm not joking, Stumpy and Scaly were two of the big three carp in Perry Street Pond. Stumpy got his name because his dorsal fin was slightly damaged in a very recognisable way and Scaly, a mirror carp, because he had one side which was much shinier than the other.

Another Brilliant Daily Mail Poll

2011-05-25T18:43:00.001+01:00

Does Britain really get anything out of the Obama visit - or is it just a PR stunt for the President?

Yes or No

You've got to love such a ranty organ.

Fancy Foreign Muck

2011-05-20T11:37:00.001+01:00

The world is getting smaller. Since man made it his mission to see what was on the other side of that hill and found that there were more hills and other men, he's been bringing exciting things back to his tribe. One of these exciting things is lasagne.

I think it's amazing that as a nation, we are educated enough to incorporate foreign foodstuffs, like curry sauce and vegetables, in to our diet. We can even cook these things in the comfort of our own kitchen thanks to the those brave grocers bringing us the ingredients we need to conjure up these exotic delights. And what do we need to make a lasagne?

The main ingredients of a good lasagna; red and white

Not tomato sauce and Béchamel sauce, no, red and white.

I don't know why it's taken me 10 years to twig this, but twig it has and I'm rather disappointed in our collective IQs.

I suppose it's easy to remember, after all...

Jesus Weptery On An Idiotic Scale

2011-05-18T13:38:00.001+01:00

If you can read this, for want of a better word, article without wishing to smash your own face into your keyboard, then you are a calmer man than I. Or you're a moron. Never discount the possibilty that you may require retraining after an hour long lunch break.

THEIR work is shrouded in secrecy and now their travel arrangements will be too.Luxury taxi driver Douglas Stokes has been given special permission to operate without a private hire label because GCHQ is one of his main customers.Licensing chiefs approved his request after he claimed staff at the intelligence centre told him they preferred to go incognito than in a marked cab. The 64-year-old is just the third cabbie in the borough to gain such an exemption.

Speaking at Cheltenham Borough Council's licensing committee on Friday, Mr Stokes said: "These are government officials who do like their discretion.

"It has been voiced as an opinion that they really don't want the cars identifiable, but we don't have anything official in writing from them."

The decision means he can pick up passengers in his £42,000 Audi A6 without presenting the council plate that is required of private hire drivers.

Documents submitted by the grandfather-of-one to the committee state that GCHQ workers "like to be able to move around without the locality they come from being identified".

Retired policeman Mr Stokes said many of the journeys he completes for the organisation are taking its staff to the airport or to London.It uses a pseudonym when making bookings and did so 19 times between the start of 2011 and March 31 to destinations like Heathrow, London, Uckington and Churchdown.Committee member Councillor Roger Whyborn (LD, Up Hatherley) said: "We all know who we are talking about, the biggest Government organisation in Cheltenham, and clearly they would be a lot happier without having plates on the vehicle."Mr Stokes works as a driver for private hire firm Bridges, a specialist in corporate taxi services. Some of his other main clients include top bosses at Superdry, G4S and Spirax Sarco.

He said: "Most of these people travel first class and they expect certain standards. There aren't many other private hire firms in town which provide a bottle of water, a copy of the

Daily Telegraph and the opportunity to work in the car."

The committee approved the application by eight votes to nil, with two abstentions. GCHQ has declined to comment.

I think GCHQ may need to move to a locale with less mouth breathers.

Super Injunctions Vs Twitter, What This Man On The Street Thinks

2011-05-10T13:32:00.002+01:00

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Ahem.

Those poor celebrities.

Modern Life Needs A Survival Guide

2011-05-09T10:55:00.003+01:00

Every so often, the Great British public are invited en masse to cast their vote. The voter walks in to a polling station, goes to a booth and puts their cross next to the person they wish to vote for.

More often than not, the person they’re voting for isn’t really who they would like to vote for, but rather they’re the person they dislike the least. Or the candidate happens to wear the colour of rosette of the party that hold some of the same values as they themselves do.

It’s party politics in this country and there’s not a lot anyone can do about it.

Now, take The Plashing Vole. Mr Vole has encapsulated what I want to say quite nicely in this post:

“One day, just once, I'd like to vote for someone I trust and respect ideologically, rather than for the least worst option. I gave the previous council candidate a chance: he knocked on the door and I asked him if he was a socialist: he refused to answer, which I thought was shameful for a Labour candidate.”

As you can probably guess, Mr Vole and I are poles apart when it comes to our political leanings but I read his blog and occasionally I find myself nodding my head. Is this because I’m quite suggestible? I hope not but it’s quite possible.

I may sometimes cringe at his naked anger towards they of the blue rosette, but to be fair, it’s no different to my past spleen ventings that were directed at the one-eyed snot gobbler and the grinning war criminal liar man.

No, I find myself agreeing with Mr Vole because some of the things that he’s railing against are just pure wrong. Take our positions on our local Tory MP for example.

The country is broken. So much so that I honestly don’t think it really matters who’s holding the reins of this runaway stage as they’ve not been connected to the horse for a long time.

The Tories will make cuts and line their own pockets.

Labour will spend money like a drunken sailor on shore leave and also line their own pockets.

Those that pay taxes, will continue to do so. Those that don’t, will continue not to.

I simply cannot get angry about it any more. It’s not that I’ve been beaten into submission by it all, I’ve just come to a few realisations about life and my little place in it.

I’ve been angry for as long as I can remember and it’s brought me nothing but trouble, debt and a string of broken friendships. I’m in my mid-thirties now and it’s high time I sorted myself out, so over the last few months that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.

I haven’t taken the Siouxsie La Do option, as tempting as it is, but I have tried to find some inner peace. Don’t worry, I’m not going to go all hippy on you.

There are around 60 million people in this country.

Sixty million people.

60,000,000 people.

I am but one man. A damned handsome and gifted man to be sure, but a solitary voice all the same. What exactly can I expect to change in this country, in my community, in my workplace? If I’m going to employ the same methods that get so many laughs on this here blog, then I’m going to achieve nothing except maybe to ostracise my peers, aggravate my stomach ulcer and possibly wind up in jail.

That isn’t a life, or at least it’s not a life worth living. Over the last couple of months, I’ve made a conscious effort to avoid or just outright ignore the things that make my blood boil.

I don’t listen to the radio or watch the news. I listen to podcasts when driving and have resigned myself to the fact that every car journey is going to take as long as it’s going to take. There’s just no point in getting all het up.

It’s also quite astonishing how much I can get done when I’m not butting heads with everyone I disagree with too! So much so that I can even get my point across *AND* get things done my way when I’m not stamping my foot like a spoiled toddler.

Whether I like it or not, and I think we’re clear on the fact that I don’t like it, the country is in a god-awful state. The debate on the AV was boiled down to vote for your favourite celebrity, people have open conversations praising TV programmes such as Britain’s Got Talent, The X Factor and The Only Way Is Essex without fear of being punched in the face, Road Tax is called Vehicle Excise Duty and I’m not allowed to hit other people’s kids for annoying me in Morrisons.

What? I said I was trying to calm down, I didn’t say that I was being very successful.

Keep Sunday Special

2011-04-21T11:29:00.001+01:00

Is the Church relevant to you in your life? Then feel free to choose not to shop on a Sunday. It will keep both you and your imaginary friend happy.

Otherwise, feel free to piss off and not demand that those of us that don't believe in children's stories are banned from going to Megamart stock up on our day off.

Rubbish Post

2011-04-16T13:29:00.000+01:00

If you’re in the Wolverhampton area, it can’t have escaped your notice that residents are being asked to separate their rubbish before putting it out for curb-side collection. As one of the many residents of this city, I can tell you that we have a green wheelie bin for garden waste, a small green bin for food waste, a green box for glass and cans, a canvas bag for cardboard and plastic and a big black wheelie bin for every thing else.

Oh the humanity!

Our local paper, the Express & Star, have scarcely hidden their disdain for the scheme. The E&S use the term slop buckets for the food caddies, make no secret of their opinion that the number of bins that Wolverhampton residents have to wrestle with is nothing short of scandalous and, if they’re position on this issue is anything to go on, live in tiny little studio flats with no more room for the many bins.

If I’m honest with you, I don’t have a problem with the rubbish collection and the recycling methods employed by the council. There is no getting around the fact that rubbish has to go somewhere and if some of it can be put to good use elsewhere, then separating it from contaminants at the end of it’s domestically useful life makes sense.

When I lived in Yeovil back in 2005, food bins and recycling bins were introduced by the council. At the same time, the tips introduced their policy of having separate skips for the separate types of waste the general public would bring.

All very sensible and laudable but for one thing; the council's attitude.

The residents were more than happy to do their bit but for some reason the council felt that the stick was a more effective form of encouragement. If you weren’t sure where to put things at the tip and had the temerity to ask one of the men working there, they were rather rude. If you were caught throwing food out with your normal rubbish then you would be fined.

This got very old extremely quickly and the council found themselves on the end of a backlash. To give South Somerset District Council their due, they quickly sorted out their attitude and happy recycling and whatnot swept across the region.

Or something like that. I moved to Wolves in 2006 and when I did live in Yeovil I was three parts plastered most of the time.

These days, my council tax is paid to Wolverhampton City Council and they do many weird and wonderful things with that money. One of the things they do that I really don’t agree with is pander to the stupid.

About £75,000 is to be spent next year telling Wolverhampton residents not to put the “wrong” type of rubbish in wheelie bins.

A “communications plan” — including putting stickers on bins — comes on top of almost £70,000 already spent for promoting recycling food waste in slop buckets.

I’m perfectly happy to sort my rubbish out into five different receptacles. I don’t need a glossy pamphlet printed in 5 different languages to tell me how.

I understand that it is essential that the lines of communication between the civil authorities and the public are kept open, take this situation for example.

To save you a click through, what happened was this: When the trees shed their leaves in the street, some civic minded souls swept these leaves up and put them into their green wheelie bin for recycling. All very laudable. The thing is though, these leaves can't be accepted for recycling because they are probably contaminated by being on the road. Instead of saying to the residents "That's really very good of you but there's a slight problem" and explaining it in civil terms, the council went with a pompous attitude and threatened fines.

After reading that, does anyone else feel the whole thing could have been handled without hassle or even without the threat of a £1000 fine? I certainly do and it could also be done without flexing the imaginary muscles of a media studies graduate. Seriously, stickers for bins?

The communiqués feel like one-way traffic most of the time and I don’t like being patted on the head by someone who designs needless leaflets with my money. I don’t need a sticker to remind me what rubbish goes in what bin.

As for those that do need the bright colours and easy to understand instructions on how to use a bin... Well, don’t give them stickers, give them condoms.

The Mule Card Technique

2011-04-05T18:13:00.000+01:00

I’ve lost count of the amount of times that I’ve written about my money worries on this blog. It may well be that this inability to count even simple things like numbers of mentions, got me in to this high interest quagmire.

Whilst I may have bored you all to tears with my own tears, let me just share with you the slim ray of sunshine that I find tanning my manly forearms:

I have stopped paying interest on my debts.

If it weren’t for interest payments, I would have paid off my original loans a dozen times over. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against the concept of interest, I have just had enough of paying so damn much of it.

For example; say you get a credit card with those charming fellows at MBNA and in a short amount of time, run up a 3 grand balance by buying lots of things with it. Not exactly a far flung scenario as many people get themselves into this position, others into the tens of thousands of pounds stages. For the sake of keeping things simple, we’ll run with the three grander.

The monthly interest payment on a standard MBNA credit card, which has a balance of £3000 is around £75 a month. If you can only afford to pay £100 a month towards that card, only 25 pounds comes off of the bottom line. If that scenario only applies to you on a good month, it won’t take long before the balance, and therefore the interest, increases due to late payment charges and the like.

It’s a vicious circle and no mistake.

Being in debt with a credit card is a pain in the backside because of the massive amount of interest. The key is to stop paying the interest and actually make a dent in the debt. I started doing this last summer and the difference is already appreciable. The only other item that is costing me money is my overdraft which, to be fair, I will find much easier to pay off thanks to already paying off one loan and doing the 0% balance transfer dance with the credit card.

But why should I continue to pay interest on it when I don't need to? The answer is quite simply, I shouldn't. I did some googling and came across a method to switch my overdraft to a 0% Balance Transfer card. This method is called The Mule Card Technique.

Luckily for me, I've been in debt for so long and made so many regular payments, my credit rating is fantastic! I applied for another credit card with generous 0% on balance transfer terms and got it. All I had to do now was get an Egg Money Card to act as the Mule. I was dealt yet another stroke of good fortune when I told a friend of my plan and he said to me "Don't bother getting yet another card, I have an Egg Money Card. Balance transfer the money to my card from your new 0% card and I'll put the cash from there into your account!"

Bonus! I'll be interest free in no time and can actually make a massive difference to my debt!

Well, I say "in no time" but it'll have to wait a week or two for my mate to get back from his holiday he went on yesterday. Talk about unfortunate timing eh readers?!

In the Zone

2011-03-31T18:54:00.003+01:00

Sometimes, not often but, sometimes, things just go right. Everything I tried today, worked first time. I fixed a problem that I've had for the past month due to a nicely pungent brainfart. That was possibly the busiest day AND productive day at work I've ever had.

I know, I'm shocked too. I managed to finally get parts of the oohdjamefirket to talk the other parts of a flickamedickdock and I came up with a design, using stuff we already have, to ensure that we have a thing that does stuff that we need it to do.

I knew you'd be pleased.

All in all, one of the best days that I've ever had at work. I was positively skipping to my car. I got in and sat on my left testicle.

This cow has no idea

I'm surprised that you didn't hear the scream from over there. Each time I cough I can feel it throb a little. I'm dreading the moment that I move something tonight that throws up some dust and I sneeze. If that happens I may well have to go to Accident & Emergency.

Tonight is Bettsy's last night in the house. He's been getting quite emotional about it for the past fortnight. To mark this sad occasion he's cooking us a meal and we're having a few beers. I think I'll wave my "no drinking during the week" rule tonight. It is almost the weekend after all.

Anyway, how are you?! Are those new shoes? You've done something with your hair.No? Whatever you're doing, it's working.

Toodles!

Good News for Motorists!

2011-03-25T15:48:00.001Z

So, the planned tax hike on fuel has been postponed and the current rate dropped by 1p a litre.

Apparently, this is good news.

I struggle to see how when my diesel bill before Christmas was £55 a week and is now £75 a week. Still, at least those poor, poor MPs have had the rules on expenses relaxed so that they can still afford to travel to work.

My knuckles are itchy.

Fat Fighters!

2011-02-22T18:50:00.001Z

All that talk of calories and actually getting thin, got me thinking. When I say thinking, I mean I started googling stuff about calories and opened yet another bloody spreadsheet. Because I’m a bit of a cynic, I treated everything I read with a pinch of salt and then started plugging numbers in to a spreadsheet. This is mainly because they all wanted to cut tasty stuff like salt out of your diet and I try to find solace in numbers when I can.

Most of the things I came across seemed designed to sell me a diet plan and the last thing I need to be doing is buying something I don’t need. Especially when I’m saving up for a new set of golf clubs that will drop 10 shots off my round GUARANTEED!

I like to think that I’m a basic kind of chap, so I decided to approach this task with only the basics in mind. I’ll warn you now that there will be some badly remembered G.C.S.E. Physics and random googling in this post.

The Human Body is a machine and machines require fuel. Our fuel is food and each item of food has an energy value which is measured in calories or Joules. Whatever calories/joules we shovel into our pieholes has to be converted into heat, sound and kinetic energy. If all those calories aren’t used up, they remain on our bodies as fat which opens us up to state sanctioned ridicule and bullying.

I dimly remember Joules being the S.I. Unit of Work which was equal to Force in Newtons times distance in metres. I weigh (have a mass of) 196lbs, or 88.5kg. Let’s say the acceleration due to gravity is 10 metres per second then we have our force (F=ma) of 885N.

So, for every metre I move, I use up 885 Joules, or 0.885kJ, which is equal to 0.211kcal. If I multiply that by 1604 (I walk a mile) that means that I should be burning off a minimum of 340 Calories*.

According to a bit of googling though, a person weighing aroung 180lbs will burn about 100 Calories in a mile walk. This was mentioned on a few different sites and got me rather confused.

I’m certain my A-Level Physics teacher, Mr Gitsham, didn’t lie to me. I trust that he steered me well when it came to equations and I would sooner believe his passionate attacks on the blackboard with a stick of chalk, over some roid monkey who is able to shut off his brain for hours at a time, to achieve the body of the homosexual men in aftershave commercials.

While I’m at it, Gerrard Butler I’m looking at you. “Because I’m worth it” indeed you massive tart.

Back to my quick calcs, where did this discrepancy between my numbers and the fitness fanatic’s charts come from? I know that no transfer of energy is ever 100% but the delta was positive rather than negative! How could this be?!

Before I could delve further in to this mystery, Friday rolled around. As I said before, finances were going to be a bit tight this month and my weekday beers were to be sacrificed. Friday isn’t a weekday and I ripped into a few cans.

After four days abstinence I was feeling decidedly tipsy by can #3. After can #7 I told myself that I would get up nice and early on Saturday and go for a run to burn off the extra calories. Needless to say, I lied.

An important thing happened during this period, I exchanged a few e-mails with my girlfriend and one of mine contained this passage:

“As for the toilet, I'll let you know on that score, it's been almost 2 days without a decent "visit" which is most unnerving. It's almost as if my body has found a way to retain the weight after all. I had a couple of slices of toast and 2 shredded wheat for breakfast but I felt a bit giddy and hungry at 11 so succumbed and opened up my packet of digestives with my cuppa. It wasn't until I'd wolfed down 7 of them that I looked at the calories and noticed that they were 74 kcals a pop. Seventy bloody four bloody each! It's just as well I have to walk to the garage this afternoon!

I'm going to work on a method of easily counting the calorie balance. The calorie burning stuff that I can find online seems a bit vague and designed to trick you into buying a diet plan. Well, someone needs to smash the hold that Weight Watchers has on the weight loss world and I think that Carter Magna is just the man to do it! Watch this space.”

“I sit here and laugh when I hear you moaning about the calories in a biscuit WELCOME TO MY WORLD! Not fun is it? Hahaha!! You've NEVER been on a diet have you? You've never even looked at the calories on a packet before either have you?

Thirty minutes sweating on my cross trainer burns under 200 calories. Do you understand my sense of despair now? If I eat 3 digestives or even a couple of natural yoghurt I've blown the hard work.”

Bit of dust?

I should have realised a damn sight earlier than I did that I was acting like a girl; counting calories, worrying about my waistline, looking for imperfections in the mirror and listening to Justin Bieber whilst dreaming that I could be the woman to turn him straight.

I’m a man damnit and I will act like a man.

I shall infuriate my girlfriend by losing weight without breaking a sweat. 1 week in and down to 193lbs... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!

* Apparently 1kcal = 1 Calorie. I wasn’t much good at Thermal Dynamics at school.

Testing 123

2011-02-18T09:26:00.002Z

This morning, I've been playin... testing some radios. My colleague, Hotdog57 has informed me that when keying the transmitter, "Testing, testing 123 over" will suffice.

I thought "This is the Good Ship Lollipop transmitting on the emergency frequency. Any survivors of the Zombie Apocalypse out there? Over" was a nice change of pace.

The Cut Carter Thought He Would Never Make

2011-02-16T18:51:00.001Z

If you thought this blog couldn’t navel gaze much more than it already does then prepare to be proved wrong. On Sunday I found a grey hair on my head and I’ve been contemplating my mortality ever since.

My 34th birthday is fast approaching and there’s no doubt that I’m not getting any younger. I’m 5 ft 10, tip the scales at 14 stone and last summer I only played 3 games of cricket due to a trick ankle. It’s fair to say that I’m a touch out of shape.

After a good long contemplate and a few cans of beer, I came to the conclusion that I will die some day but it’s probably a way off and having grey hair is preferable to going bald or dying it with Just For Men.

"Tell me I need to dye my hair or wear a wig again, bitch..."

That’s a trip to the therapist saved then.

The weather in the Midlands was pretty treacherous just before Christmas and as a consequence, I was forced to take three days unpaid leave because I couldn’t get into work. My payslip dropped on to the hallway mat on Saturday and informed me that this month’s pay packet would be light by three days.

As I was leaving work yesterday, I noticed the all too familiar pattern on the tarmac underneath my car. Another oil-spill rainbow destined to put a crimp in my day, wallet and countenance. Diagnosis; new steering pump required.

Since I turned 18, a mere 16 years ago, I have mainly lived on my own or with male housemates. These agreeable cohabitants have never requested that I cut down my beer intake, give up smoking, spend less on entertainment, eat healthier or get rid of my spare tyre. It would however, seem that every single bloody one of my cars wants me to live as a hermit.

Basically, a 15% pay cut for this month and a further payment to my friendly neighbourhood mechanic has forced me to take some drastic action for at least this month.

I could easily go to the bank and borrow some more. It’ll be dearer in the long term and I don’t want to do it so I’m not going to.

No dear reader. As of yesterday, I will have to do without my weekday Guinness.

If you haven’t fainted dead away at this most outrageous of suggestions, I can only assume that you are a first time visitor to this blog, don’t know me very well, are a moron or you’re made of sterner stuff than I gave you credit for. I don’t think there has been a day in the past 4 years that I haven’t guzzled at least three cans of the black stuff.

If you are wondering why this is only the case for the last four years it’s because I used to drink lager.

For some reason, my girlfriend doubled up with laughter when I informed her of my course of action.

“Aw Pooky! Have the shakes kicked in yet? The cold sweats? Blurry vision? Dry mouth? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!”

Once she had finished hammering the sarcasm button, she started being almost supportive;

“How many cans were you drinking a day then?”
“About six-ish a day, I think.”
“Six?!”
“Well, on the weekdays, yeah.”
“Six?!”
“Yes!”
“On a weekday?”
“Well, not at work obviously.”
“You know what I mean.” She paused.
“Um, how many calories are there in a can of Guinness then?”
“Google says… 180 calories”
“So times that by 6 gives 1080 calories which means you’re getting about a third of your calorific intake from just Guinness.”
“I s’pose.”
“So if you’re not drinking that means you’re going to lose weight.”
“Reckon?”
“Yes! It’s going to bloody fly off you and you’ll be attractive to other women!”
“Hang fire, are you saying I’m not attractive?”
“That’s not important right now. No. I can't have this. I order you to go to the corner shop and get some beer!”

I really can’t win.

Calculations on the back of a fag packet

2011-02-11T15:51:00.000Z

I've been looking at the Spreadsheet of Doom a lot less in recent months. I'm a little ways off being free of that there debt stuff but I'm nowhere near as constricted as I used to be.

Things are starting to look up. Even the new car appears to be behaving itself! It has this neat little feature that lets me know if I've left the lights on; when I open the door a buzzer sounds. My old car did a similar thing to let me know if I'd left the lights on by it running the battery down. I certainly knew that I'd left the lights on then.

You may have noted in a previous post that I'm starting to take stock of my life and I've been doing some sums on the bag of a fag packet.

Basically, I'm now rich.

If you want to find out how I did it, send a donation of not less than 50 quid by bank transfer. There's no reason not to share the wealth.

How To Make Friends and Influence People, Carter Style

2011-02-08T11:12:00.003Z

Language is a wondrous thing. It is the single greatest tool that the Human Race has developed and without it, we would never have reached the dizzy heights that we have.

The English language has many accents, dialects, idioms and despite it's potential for greatness, it is butchered on a regular basis, not least by me. Whether it is cold blooded murder of the English tongue at the hands of surly teenagers, chavs and yobs or the mangling of grammar, syntax and sense in any corporate piece of self puff, it can often be difficult to understand. Birtspeak 2.0 is just such an example.

If you're lucky, then encountering this overegging of the paragraph pudding won't be a regular occurrence. I was unfortunate enough to receive an e-mail worded in management speak the other day and I couldn't for the life of me understand it. I tried, I really did but it was no use. Just as I was wrangling with this dilemma, my cockney colleague KP wandered past. KP is one of those rare management types that has kept his human side and straddles the chasm between shop floor and office. Just the chap to help me out of this pickle with his fluency in corporate language and ability to translate it in to laymen's terms for me.

"Here KP, you talk bullshit don't you..."

Boxing Vs The UFC Round II

2011-02-07T19:06:00.003Z

Before I start I would like to point out that whilst the UFC may not be the only game in town when it comes to Mixed Martial Arts, it’s arguably the biggest. I’ve also never had the privilege of watching a Pride, Stikeforce or DREAM event so I’ll stick with what I know... For once. For the record, I'm also a massive boxing fan.

If you’re a boxing fan and haven’t watched a UFC event before, I heartily recommend that you do. I’ve been a convert since new housemate Bettsy introduced it to Masher and I last March. I tried getting my Dad to watch it once, but after 15 seconds he declared it to be no better than a pub fight and promptly turned over.

Suffice to say I hadn’t done a very good job of selling the concept of MMA in the Octagon to the aficionado of the Queensbury rules. I shall attempt to do so here.

The prospect of a Pacquiao Mayweather showdown leaves me salivating. The problem is though, Pacquiao Vs Mayweather may never happen.

It’s a strange state of affairs that allows the two best boxers in the Welterweight division, to hold titles and never face each other in the ring. This wouldn’t be allowed to happen in the Ultimate Fighting Championship. The champion will fight the top ranked contender and no amount of wrangling over a contract will stop it.

This is because the UFC is the train set of one man, Dana White. Democracy loving pundits will shudder at what I’m about to say, but say it I will; this is a very good thing. Whilst Chelsea F.C. may be struggling because Abramovich thinks that he knows best, the UFC is succeeding because Dana White actually does know what’s best. He has the interests of the UFC at heart and, to him, that means looking after the fighters, putting on the fights people want to see and making sure the results are fair.

Let’s face it, when a decision is crooked it’s not only the fighter on the bad end of that decision that feels cheated. How many boxing matches have you watched that have been utterly ruined by a dubious decision? I’ll bet you can think of a few and I’ll also wager that there was a flag waving dude with spiky, grey hair somewhere at ringside.

At first glance, the UFC seems like nothing more than a sanctioned brawl, this is certainly how it looked to my Dad and what prompted the turnover. I’ll admit to a similar level of misunderstanding to start with too. Instead of switching over though, I just enjoyed the spectacle! Over the last year, I’ve grown to understand more about the ground game and it’s fascinating stuff. Like watching a really good battle between a canny batsmen and a spin bowler, the grappling on display in the UFC is about much more than brute strength and ignorance.

I would almost liken the stand up stuff to T20 and the ground game to Test Cricket.

Almost.

Strauss and Ponting decide to settle it old school.

The question of who would win between a mixed martial artist and a boxer has been asked many times. It was answered when James Toney stepped into the Octagon against Randy Couture; a boxer would get his ass handed to him in no time flat.

In the square circle I think you have got to give the boxer the advantage. For a start, boxers wear 10 ounce gloves and that padding serves to lessen the chance of a knock out. Fighters in the UFC wear 4 oz gloves which increase the likelihood of a KO when a hard punch lands flush. Because of this, an MMA fighter’s stand up game tends to consists of throwing big punches which, unless a lucky haymaker gets through, doesn’t get results in boxing. 12 rounds of 3 minutes is a very long time to be swinging against someone who knows how to cover up. Just ask George Foreman what happened when he first came up against an effective defence.

I’m not promoting the Health & Safety angle but be fair, who doesn’t love a knock out?! A fighter getting his bell rung is all part of the fight game, it’s not a tickling contest after all, but, so far, the fighters in the UFC are very well looked after and are also encouraged to be ambassadors for the sport.

As for the coverage here in the UK, the UFC shown on ESPN kicks any Sky Box Office or ITV presentation's ass.

The fights are shown in full, no cutting away to adverts between rounds. Sure, Mike Goldberg will do that very American TV thing of "the fight clock is brought to you by Subway, the best way to enjoy a sandwich." It doesn't matter though because it's a split second aside, done in a professional manner and you can still hear the crowd baying for blood. Cutting away to Julie Walters flogging groceries for ASDA will ruin any tension a boxing match has built up.

Also, if you've paid 15 quid for a pay per view event, what the hell are the surplus ads doing in there anyway! The drama in the corners is all part of the fight. The UFC know this and have cameramen that interpret non-English speaking seconds. Now *that* is clever stuff.

Despite all of that, I still love boxing. I can't wait to see Pacquiao Vs Mayweather, Haye Vs one of the Klitschko brothers or Kahn Vs Bradley.

None of these fights are guaranteed and as un-Libertarian as the next question is, shouldn't they be?

Boxing Vs The UFC

2011-02-07T11:00:00.001Z

I'll save you 5000 words of waffle.

The UFC wins. Every damn time.

If you want the waffle, and even if you don't, I'll tell you why later on.

Angry People In Local News

2011-01-26T19:23:00.003Z

I was clicking through some blogroll links earlier and a particular blog title caught my eye: Angry People In Local News and it's every bit as brilliant as it sounds. Local newspapers with angry locals.

Every now and then I like to troll the Chard & Ilminster News or the Express and Star to see if I can find some blog fodder. This site though, well, it blew my socks off with its simplicity.

Beer taxi anger

Dog poop anger

Planning permission anger

and my favourite (so far)

Broken Toilet Anger

Greenock Telegraph: Woman left without toilet for threee weeks...

... neighbours getting a bit upset about her straining into a corner of the communal garden.

Utter brilliance dear reader.

We Must Stamp Out The Internet!

2011-01-25T19:29:00.004Z

I get e-mail updates from Theyworkforyou.com whenever my MP, Paul Uppal, speaks or gets replies from written questions. Today, I got this link which pointed me to this question:

Dangerous internets

Ok people, let's not take this out of context. I'm sure the honourable gent doesn't want to shut down the internet as an entity and I'm sure the Home Secretary isn't agreeing with him. Let's scroll up to the top and read the entire exchange...

Nope, Paul Uppal wants something done about the internet.

Do I really believe that? No. Not for one second. I think Paul's just trying to look hard and asking poorly thought out questions. Again.

Paul Uppal: To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport what progress he has made on making future home Ashes test matches available on free-to-air television.

Not an issue for parliament to get involved in Paul. Personally, I think BBC3 should be shitcanned as a matter of urgency, the airspace and budget given over to making sure that England Cricket, Rugby, Football and tiddlywinks are given the due prominence they deserve. That's for my dictatorship though Paul, not for a government that aspires to be less hands on.

You also know full well that nothing will ever happen on that front. Stop trying to score cheap points.

Paul Uppal: To ask the Secretary of State for Health how many GPs in Wolverhampton received over £100,000 from the NHS in the most recent 12 months for which figures are available.

An old trick of Paul's this: He's asked a very specific question on a topical question knowing full well that the answer is not one that will be given at parliamentary level. "Sorry constituents, I *did* ask!"

Paul Uppal: To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills whether the Royal Mail has made an estimate of the savings which would accrue from reducing the number of postal deliveries to five per week.

Now this one is so far out of left-field I really don't know what to say.

From what we've seen of Paul in the first few months of his tenure, I can only assume that he's banking on one single term as an MP. I've got a bad feeling about this bloke.

Update: The Plashing Vole has a more comprehensive fisking here.

Dim Blogger Responds

2011-01-24T20:24:00.003Z

Well, that last post generated some comment.

From cycling website of the year, road.cc:

"The campaign, and Pendleton’s involvement in it, hasn’t met with universal approval, however, with one blogger describing it as providing his “Monday morning Jesus Wept.”

The blogger, who apparently fails to appreciate that potholes put cyclists at an increased risk compared to other road users, has been put right on that point in the comments to his entry, as well as receiving clarification over his misuse of the outdated term “road tax” (and his urging of cyclists to “pay some” of it)."

Response required then.

It did provide my Monday morning Jesus wept but in the mad rush to post something during my boss' fag break, I don't think I was clear enough in the post as to why.

Potholes should not be front page news and it shouldn't take the opinion of anyone in the public eye to "raise awareness" of the damn things. I'd feel the same if Kim and Aggie started a campaign to get the bins emptied once a week, it should happen anyway!

Potholes should be fixed straightaway. Without argument, publicity or hesitation. It's a basic requirement and, as was pointed out to me, we all pay for it. My views on taxation and what the distribution of public funds should be are a different matter. Like I said if I pay it and it goes into the public purse, it’s a tax. If I pay it via the petrol pump or the little disc in the windscreen, it’s a tax. Outdated term or not, it's a tax, it's taken at gunpoint and calling it by another name just obscures the fact that it's a tax.

I didn't say anything about potholes being merely an annoyance to motorists and a very real danger to cyclists for the same reason I don't condemn kiddy porn in every post I write. It's taken as read isn't it?

I don't "hate" cyclists and I wasn't "hating on" Miss Pendleton. I hate everyone on the road who isn't doing the same speed as me. ;o)

Once we've all calmed down.

Call me dim if you like, that was the retweeted term on Twitter after all, but do so on the strength of more than just one post and at least give credit for the willingness to engage, rather than shout down or ignore.

Those Poor Cyclists

2011-01-24T09:29:00.002Z

My Monday morning Jesus Wept has arrived on my screen courtesy of Olympic cyclist Victoria Pendleton:

Britain has a pothole crisis and the nation’s roads must be made safer, Olympic cyclist Victoria Pendleton has said.

Crisis? Is this on the same level as our obesity epidemic? I only ask because it must be important if an Olympic athlete is bopping their chops.

According to the latest figures, an average of around 10 potholes dot every mile of road in England and Wales, and the total number will pass two million for the first time this year.

If you're out there counting them, take some tarmac and a Whacker Plate with you and fill them in.

Cyclists are now being deterred from using their bikes because of poor road surfaces, Miss Pendleton said.

Well, every cloud and all that.

“Following more bad weather this winter, potholes are still a serious problem for road users, particularly people cycling to work or school, cycling for fun, keeping fit, or even cycling professionally,” she said.

“We have to make our roads safer and more accessible for cyclists who often lack confidence to ride their bikes in and around urban areas because of poor road surfaces.”

Then pay some road tax.

Her comments follow warnings that councils will struggle to repair potholes because of a £165 million shortfall in funding.

The Local Government Association, which represents around 350 councils, said highways departments will be hit by cuts as they begin to survey the damage exacerbated by the worst December weather in a century.

I don't want excuses. Fix the potholes.

According to the Asphalt Industry Alliance, every mile of local authority-owned road in England and Wales will have 10 potholes. The organisation, which produces a yearly report on the roads, said the number of potholes could reach two million by the spring.‬
‪ ‬
‪Special interest group ahoy!

“This is a very serious issue. Cyclists and motorcyclists are the road users most vulnerable to accidents caused by potholes,” the alliance’s Helen Melhuish said. “If central government provided more funding to help get local roads back into reasonable condition, local authorities would be better able to implement their planned preventative maintenance programmes, rather than wasting already stretched funds on reactively filling potholes.”

What’s with this pandering to cyclists rhetoric?

“Miss Pendleton, 30, is supporting an awards scheme to judge UK councils on repairs to potholes which occur when water repeatedly freezes and expands in cracks in the road. She said: “I’m getting involved because anything that showcases pothole repairs and encourages councils to improve their roads has to be a good thing for both cyclists and motorists.”

Yeah, because target led bureaucracy has worked so very well in every other aspect of public services.

Jesus wept, what's the problem here? Duty on fuel brings in more money than any other commodity. Use that money where it's supposed to be used and tell the cyclists to put their hands in their pockets if they want to have an opinion on the roads. As per usual, this falls under the heading of "Things that should not need explaining". We pay tax upon tax upon tax so that certain things are taken care of.‬
‪ ‬
‪Rubbish collection, water supply, roads, policing, health care, education.‬
‪ ‬
‪
These things do not need endorsement by celebrities. They are basic services that should be provided at a standard level because we bloody well pay for them, with the threat of jail if we don't. Get the basics right, we're not asking much.
‬
‪

Dead Cert

2011-01-21T10:09:00.001Z

I've never been very money driven. It's always been fairly easy to get hold of as I've always worked and if you work, people will lend you cash. As you probably already know, I'm nearing the point where I won't owe anyone any cash and might even be able to have a savings account with some actual savings in.

The weak link in my plan to change my life for the happier is cash. To do what I want to do, I need to build up a war chest and I need to build it quickly. I e-mailed a friend of mine who knows a thing or two about other peoples money.

From: Carter
To: Sensible Mate
Subject: Investment AdviceDude,

I need to turn £100 into £100,000 so I can follow my lifelong dream of not working. Any ideas?

Carter

From: Sensible Mate
To: Carter
Subject: Re: Investment Advice

Give it to me and I will invest it for that turnaround no problem. Want my bank details?

From: Carter
To: Sensible Mate
Subject: Re: Re: Investment Advice

Awesome. Any chance you can lend me £100?

I haven't heard back from him yet but this could be the start of something big for Mrs. Magna's little boy.

Siouxsie La Do

2011-01-19T20:20:00.002Z

What do you do if you get to your mid-thirties and discover that you’re in the wrong job? You did your GCSEs, A-Levels, accounting degree, got a placement with a firm of accountants and 15 years on, come to the conclusion that while the money may be good, you hate every damn punch of the calculator button, your co-workers are nothing like your friends, you arrive home miserable and your soul is slowly dribbling out of your ears.

Upon this imaginary discovery you have an epiphany; you would much rather earn a crust turning tricks up against walls for submariners on shore leave under the trade name Siouxsie La Do.

Hypothetically speaking.

Once you’ve finished wishing your careers advisor a painful boil on his bum, you'll probably just get on with the rest of your life. You might add in some light cottaging on the weekend, you know, to just fill the gap in your heart, but that’s not mandatory.

Another hard earned life lesson given to you for free dear reader. If I knew then what I knew now…

"Hindsight is 20-20" may well be an old saying, but it’s true. I once put a tenner on Antonio Barrera to give Prince Nazeem an ass kicking and won. Haseem Rahman Vs Lennox Lewis was on a week later and I had a strong feeling that an upset was on the cards.

Lewis had taken the massive underdog Rahman lightly and had left himself scant time to acclimatise to the African atmospheric conditions before the fight. Instead of taking the punt, I kept the Barrera Vs Naz winnings in my back bin. Lewis was put on his ass in the 5th round and stayed there.

I could’ve made a mint.

Coulda,
woulda,
shoulda.

Hindsight is 20-20, If ifs and ands were pots and pans, life would be a kitchen and so on and so forth. Once you’re on a particular career path it can be hard to change because the thing about working and receiving a wage, is that modern life is choc full of traps to keep you working and paying tax.

If I was to believe everything I hear around the water cooler, apparently it’s really, really important to own your own property. Your average mortgage, if you’ve not gone crazy and gone way over your budget, lasts for about 25 years and takes around half of your salary. During that 25 years, you may want to get a bigger place because you’ve knocked up your missus. That bigger place will cost you more money and so that final mortgage payment slips further to the right by another 25 years.

You have to keep working because you have to pay the mortgage, feed the family, clothe them, keep them entertained and hey, how about some Gucci consumer goods for yourself there Chester?

You’re a cog, in a wheel, in a machine that’s part of a sub-system that services some small part of a bigger system and the whole thing is run by men in smoky rooms, lighting fat cigars with fifty pound notes whilst using the carved out skull of a white rhino as an ashtray.

It’s true. I saw a video on YouTUBE all about it.

Now I can sit here and bitch and moan about this state of affairs ‘till the cows come home and it won’t make a blind bit of difference. My bills still need paying and so I’ll continue to suckle at the teat of a big corporation no matter what it does to my soul.

Or I could do something about it.

Carter Needs a Sliding Scale

2011-01-12T20:39:00.001Z

There comes a time in every man’s life that he has to ask himself “What’s important?”

With an opening like that, you may leap to the conclusion that this is a goodbye blogging post. It is not. Just so’s we’re clear, it isn’t a goodbye cruel world missive either.

When attempting to quantify importance, it helps to define a standard unit of measurement. Force is measured in Newtons, magnetic flux is measured in Webers, the unit of capacitance is named after Faraday and I’m pretty sure that the SI Unit of self-importance is the Cowell.

Approximately 3.2 Goves or 0.000000000001 Guidos

Things that are deemed to be important “matter”, so perhaps this should be our unit? The question then poses itself, is matter a derivative quantity? After all, the importance of something is deemed to be much greater when the consequences of not doing, or forgetting said important thing, can be said to be significant.

So, if Events are measured in “wife’s birthdays” and the consequences of forgetting the event are measured in “days in the doghouse”, we have a particular brand of blog post that is going absolutely nowhere.

Instead, have a read of this and tell me if you didn’t feel slightly uneasy. Oh, bear in mind that I saw this web page at work and therefore did not have access to the embedded YouTUBE clip when I penned this post. This post would have been so much more vitriolic if I had…

The Fun Theory is basically thus: people will do the right thing if you make the right thing fun to do. Winning other peoples' money is totally fun, so Kevin Richardson designed a traffic camera that would facilitate just that. Bad drivers get tickets; good drivers get entered in a lottery to win the cash. And in this case the Fun Theory held true—the average speed of traffic went down 7 km/hour with the Lottery Camera installed.

When I first read it, I couldn’t quite put my finger on what made me feel so uncomfortable. Speeders get punished, people obeying the law get rewarded. Sounds like a win/win premise doesn’t it? Was it just my innate sense of awkward soddedness that was putting me off? Was it my natural reaction to dismiss as completely wet and wussy, any sort of idea that comes packaged as a “Fun Theory” that was making my knuckles itch and eyes roll?

Let’s ignore for the time being, the fact that I have triggered more than one Gatsostapo camera and have had to attend two infuriatingly titled Speed Awareness Workshops to avoid getting points on my license. It’s not relevant. Honestly, it’s not.

Well, first off you have to say that anything that’s packaged as fun is anything but fun. People who espouse fun are the type of people that use terms such as zany or wacky, without any hint of shame. These people are not to be trusted and should never be invited to a party where you might actually want to have some fun.

I would also like to know, why anyone should be rewarded for driving as they’re supposed to drive in the first place. The article doesn’t state whether this Lottery Camera discards any vehicles that are travelling too slowly for the road. It’s a nailed on fact that perennial slow drivers should be punished most harshly of all. Especially if the Nissan Micra loving coffin dodgers get in my way…

Whatever it may be about this article that makes me angry, it really shouldn’t. It doesn’t affect me and it is not being suggested by the morons that make up local and national government in this country. I really shouldn’t be reacting in a manner that causes me to bang out 500 odd words (so far) on something that doesn’t apply to me.

You may think I’m a grumpy bugger and oftentimes, you’d be absolutely right. You may think that this is a very trivial thing for me to be annoyed about and yes, it’s so low on the scale of things that matter that my time really could be better spent directing my ire elsewhere.

But that’s just it.

There are so many aspects of modern life that make me seethe. There are so many things that make me grind my teeth and compel me to rage at the world. From politics to politicians, motoring to motorists, from generic policies and procedures with only the hard of thinking in mind and all manner of things in between. All of the things that are my bugbears, that poke the animal inside me, the animal inside that has been growling for a while now and it wants to tear the throat out of this soft, indolent world’s neck and start it all over again.

Or something.

I have to stop getting worked up about things that I cannot affect and by Christ, aren’t there so many things that I will never be able to alter:

People who use front fog lights when it isn’t foggy.

Piers “Morgan” Moron.

The price of diesel at the pump.

Health & Safety posters.

The X Factor.

People that won’t get out of the middle lane of a motorway.

Oh dear god! People that won’t get out of the middle lane of a motorway! There is a special place in hell reserved for those unthinking, ignorant, stupid cloggers of the nation’s arterial asphalt. There really ought to be some sort of exam you have to pass before going out on the road…

I admit it. I am an angry man and it takes virtually nothing to light my metaphorical blue touch paper. This could be because I was born 40 years too late, or maybe I learned a few incorrect methods of anger management whilst growing up.

Perhaps I’m just a bit of a mentalist.

Probably.

Whatever the reason for my short fuse, I’m not getting any younger (I’ll be 34 in March) and it’s about time I just calmed the fuck down.

I’m aiming to make 2011 a drama free year, get at least 52 games of golf in and get my batting average above that of a first class international bowler.

I’ll keep you posted.

Set An Idiot To Catch An Idiot

2010-12-17T15:00:00.001Z

Or rather, send out your troops to look like idiots and educate idiots.

Bin collections were disrupted and pipes burst as Arctic conditions returned to Walsall today - as police warned drivers about the dangers of leaving defrosting car engines running.

Officers conducted an early-morning operation in Streetly, targeting motorists who had left cars to defrost on their driveways despite a recent spate of thefts.

[...]

During today’s extensive police operation, eight motorists were given a stark warning for leaving their defrosting cars unattended.

Police were on patrol between 6am and 8am in Streetly, which has been a hotspot for high-value car thefts in the recent cold weather.

Sgt Andy Middleton said: “We need to get the message across that there are thieves waiting to capitalise.”

To which there really are only two responses.

1) I would tell the nice man in the high viz jacket to jog on and mind his own business

2) If your car gets nicked because you left it running and unattended, then you are too stupid to own a motor vehicle and deserve to have it nicked.

Further comment really is unnecessary, wouldn’t you say?

Carter Vs The Ministry of Transport Part II

2010-12-16T11:22:00.000Z

I passed my driving test with two minor faults, at the first attempt, about 4 months after my 17th birthday. I don’t want you to think that I’m bragging so I shall also inform you that I put my Mum’s Mini Metro into the back of a parked Mazda 323, on the actual day of my 17th birthday.

I had learnt to drive in that Mini Metro and also in my driving instructor’s Peugeot 205 so perhaps it was a tad ambitious of me to be driving a bus of a Cortina Estate a mere month later. My Gran sold me her MkIV Cortina Estate for a quid and this car was known affectionately as Ecto One.

When I told my Dad that the fag lighter in it actually worked, he informed me “That’s not a fag lighter son, that’s a cigar lighter. This was an executive’s car.”

The starter motor was dodgy as hell which necessitated parking on a hill, every time I parked, so I could bump start it if the need arose. The void bushes were shot and it felt like I was fishtailing up the road, despite keeping a perfectly straight line. It handled like a boat and the combination of 17 year old driver, rear wheel drive and any type of adverse weather was potentially lethal.

On the plus side; the stereo worked a treat, we could cram eight of us in to go to the beach and goddamn, I loved that car.

I’ve blogged before about my car history and only a fortnight ago I was penning the obituary for my last car. It took less than one public transport based round trip to work to realise that no, getting to work by train is not a viable enterprise for me.

Doing the public transport commute dance requires the following steps: I have to get up at 5am, pay £1.50 for the bus, £15.80 for the train and I don’t get to work until after 8. I then don’t finish work until gone 5pm, the next train from Malvern, if it’s on time, isn’t until 6:15pm and, if I’m lucky enough to catch an evening bus back in Wolves to my street for another £1.50, I don’t get back through my front door until gone 8pm.

The annual Carter Car Hunt it is then.

I checked my finances and pulled up the Auto Trader website. There are many cheap cars out there but I suspected that there was very little chance of bagging another Ecto One. I had 400 quid to spend and I needed to find a diesel that could handle 80 miles a day, had some ticket and wasn’t going to fall apart on me.

The first thing to do in these situations is to ring one’s Mum and have a good cry.

After the consultation with the parental units, miraculously my budget had increased and so had the expectations of the type of car I should be looking for.

Don’t look at me like that. I’ve had enough. In the words of John Lennon “A working class hero is something to be, a working class hero means bugger all to me.” Or at least, that’s how I interpreted it.

Wolves to Malvern is 40 miles. That’s 80 miles a day, 400 miles a week and, near as damnit is to swearing, 20,000 miles a year. Providing I get out of bed by 6 it takes an hour in the morning and an hour and a half to get home. That’s a whopping 12 and half hours a week spent on the road just commuting.

In the last 4 years I’ve destroyed a Peugeot 109 1.4 diesel, a 306 1.9 diesel and a Citroen ZX 1.9TD. Each of these cars were purchased at the bottom end of the market and performed accordingly.

First things first, I needed to get rid of the Citroen. I ripped the stereo out, took my golf shoes out of the boot, sent the tax disc off and got a rebate of 68 quid for 4 full months. I then rang one of those car scrap recovery places and left the keys, logbook and an envelope in the glovey for them to post my part of the V5 and the £100 through my door. When I returned from work that night, five twenty pound notes had been posted through the letter box into the porch with my part of the logbook but they’d neglected to use the envelope...

The door to the porch is completely see through.

I was determined to clear all of my debts before getting a half decent motor but sod it. For the last three weeks I’ve been driving to work in my newly acquired 2002 Mondeo 2.0TDCi. It’s comfortable, runs nicely, has reduced the diesel bill and has an even nicer stereo than Ecto 1 had. It’s a quantum leap in quality and I am glad that I was bullied into getting it by my Mum and my girlfriend.

I thought I heard the steering pump making a distressed noise and I was ready to nosedive into despair. I took the car to the garage this morning, and my mechanic said "I can't seem to find anything wrong with your car Mr. Magna." I never thought I would hear him say those words. He looked rather ashen faced as he told me this. I could tell he was trying to work out how to tell his kids that Christmas was cancelled and that he could only afford to keep one of them.

If you’re a regular reader of this here blog then you are aware that I somehow, things keep happening to me. Some of this is my fault and some of it is pure bad luck. This morning, Hotdog57 suggested that everyone start calling me Murphy. I smiled at such a daft notion, it was obvious that the tide was beginning to turn for Mrs. Magna’s little boy.

I thought the laughter was rather unnecessary and went on a little too long when we discovered that I had a puncture. 130 quid for a new pair of tyres.

Jesus wept.

The Man. Just The Absolute Man

2010-11-25T18:33:00.002Z

Sir Terry Pratchett became an adjunct Professor at Trinity College Dublin University, back in 2008. Terry's inaugural lecture was recorded and is up on that there YouTube thing. I've embedded it below.

It's an hour long and it's an hour extremely well spent.

My Hero.

Carter Vs The Ministry of Transport, Episode 94, Part 1

2010-11-22T21:08:00.008Z

It's around this time of year, I make yet another reference to the Sam Vimes Boots Theory Of Socio-Economic Injustice, as my car is put through an MoT. I dream of the year when I will have a car that will provide me with sound, solid, reliable transportation rather than a broken heart, an even broker wallet and a soul withering, yet hopefully temporary, reliance on public transport.

2010 will not be that year.

For the fourth year running, I dropped the car off at my favoured garage in Malvern, was welcomed with open arms and invited to their Christmas do. Well, I have put two of his kids through college after all. I'm almost part of the family.

An hour or so later he handed me the red tinged Refusal of an MOT Test Certificate. The list of test failures ran into two sheets, which is no small beer for a vehicle that squeaked through last year with minimal work and only two advisories.

Knackered suspension, corroded brake pipes, streeeeeeeeetched handbrake cable, brake pads dangerously thin, rear tyres under the legal limit, rear offside tyre fouling the wheel arch (the rear axle was scru-hooood), oil leak, excessive corrosion (which was seriously affecting the vehicle structure strength within a couple of inches of the body mountings) and, to top it all off, the registration plate light bulb had gone.

The rest I could have handled but that little tungsten filament letting me down was just too much to bear.

My mechanic recognised the the 1000 yard stare and surreptitiously moved anything dangerous out of arms length.

"It's fixable Mr. Magna," he reassured me "it'll just cost a bit." he said as he began scribbling figures on a scrap of paper and punching them into a calculator. Once the running total passed £700 and I saw he still had many more iterations to go, I decided enough was enough and called a halt to his dream of getting his youngest into Oxford without a scholarship.

"Oh well," I said, scrabbling to find a silver lining to this diesel engine generated cloud. "At least I've got a fortnight before the old ticket runs out. I should be able to find something in that time."
"Actually Mr. Magna, no you don't."

These days, the test stations are all hooked up to the DVLA database and when a cars fails an MoT, it is automatically declared unroadworthy and this trumps your old MoT certificate. If an Automatic Number Plate Recognition camera clocks you, a flag is raised and you will be pulled over by the boys in high viz yellow. I could drive my car home and that was that. Oh, and it still cost 50 quid.

Bugger.

I'll have to travel to work by train.

Oh dear god no.

WHY?! WHY ME?!

With a small pop, a mini-Carteresque apparition appeared on my left shoulder. Clad in white, sporting angel wings, harp and a halo, he wagged his finger and began to chastise me:

"Well, the same reason as the last four times, Carter; you're crap with money and have planned poorly.

A car is a mechanical device that relies on controlled explosions within small chambers, the plastic and elastic properties of rubber boots and metal springs, of hydraulic fluid, water, electronics and a dizzying configuration of all of these things.

This particular example was designed and built by the French for Christ sake! Aside from the reverse gear being more reliable than a Goodyear condom, what on Earth did you expect it to do, Carter? Survive the way you drove the damn thing as if you were in an episode of Grand Theft Auto Kidderminster?

Of course not. The frame was going to buckle and bend, the tyres were going to shred, something in the engine would make a sproing sound and you'll be taking Shanksy's pony to the nearest train station."

It was at this point I wondered whether Daphers had slipped something into my tea or that I'd finally snapped.

Little cliche angel on the shoulder Carter, evaporated as soon as his existence as a literary device had been served. I waited for little cliche devil on the opposite shoulder Carter to arrive, hoping that he'd agree with me on the need for many pints of Guinness, but he didn't show. This may be because I am the devil version of Carter that the Everyman version was usurped by, but it's probably more to do with the fact that this particular flight of fancy has less mileage than my Citroen has left.

All of this happened, apart from the bits about non-existent manifestations of my consciousness, last Monday. Since then, I have been getting the bus and taking the train to work and back.

Dear reader, the last week of my life may make for a funny story some day. At this precise moment in time, the wounds are still far too raw for me to recount any of it.

I'll start part 2 tomorrow. I'll be all healed up by then I 'spect.

Neighbourhood Diplomacy

2010-11-19T11:04:00.000Z

The problem with the Daily Mail... Sorry, one of the problems with the Daily Mail... Hang on, I'll try again; one of the many problems with The Daily Mail is that it's hard to take it seriously.

It's nicknamed the Daily Hate, described as fascism with oven gloves on and the crossword is far too easy.
The Daily Mail is hysterical, shrieking, self appointed oncology specialist and home to a more than adequate fashion section. So I'm told...

There's no getting away from the fact that it is a popular paper. Popular doesn't mean good though. You only have to look at the continued success of Peter Andre, The X-Factor, Jordan, Piers "Morgan" Moron and so on and so on. All this means is that the country is made up of an awful lot of horrendously stupid people.

Millions of them.

It's Darwinism in action really. Instead of letting the weak, stupid and useless die, we fed and watered them. They then flourished into people that thought Jade Goody was a worthwile entity.

Ah well. I appear to have wandered off the point.

Whenever I receive a link to the paper's website, I am minded to treat it with a pinch of salt.

That'll teach you to block my car in: OAP caught on CCTV shunting vehicle blocking his garage

The old boy had a garage and some inconsiderate pratt parked in front of it, blocking him in. You can tell that this happens quite often and that our octegenarian protagonist had had enough and barged the offending car out of the way.

Fair play to him.

As per usual though, the beak gets it rather wrong and bans Mr Pemberton from driving and awards the plank in the illegally parked Ford Ka damages.

In Carterland, where the citizens live in fear of not being manly enough and must avoid getting on my thruppennies for fear of a slap, the ruling handed down would have been slightly more in favour of the old boy.

The driver who blocked in Mr Pemberton would have been ordered to say sorry, have "I park in handicap bays" tattooed on his forehead and pay for the rent of an adjacent garage and a forklift for a year. The keys to this garage and forklift would then be available to all of the garage owners.

Precedent would then be set and the young lad over the road from me would think twice before blocking me in again too. Not that I have been prejudiced to this particular story.

Talking of the lad across the road, he blocked me in on my drive one cold Thursday morning, 6am to be precise, and I did follow the advice given by the magistrate in the story, which was [...]to leave a note on the windscreen and have a word when they come back. Except in my case the note said "YOU IGNORANT ****" and relations have been strained ever since.

I've had the slow stare from him, the loud but not quite loud enough comments across the street and parking near but not quite near enough to cross the line type of thing. I'm not sure when, but I think words will have to be exchanged and I'll put him on his ass. You know, just to straighten the whole thing out and clear the air.

Carter Magna, Ladies and Gentlemen. Winner of Neighbour of the Year 2010.

David Haye Vs Audley Harrison

2010-11-13T19:16:00.001Z

Because I can't help but make a fool of myself when it comes to sporting predictions, here it is:

Haye in 2, reminiscent of his demolishment* of Enzo Maccarinelli.

Either way, I'm looking forward to this one.

*Trademark Joe Rogan

Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

And the Vicar said "No! That's My Wife's!"

2010-11-13T07:12:00.001Z

This is a repost from Sunday 17th January, when I first heard about the Paul Chambers situation:

Via Satans Thong (brilliant blog and definitely NSFW or recommended for the easily offended) comes this from new blog The Bearer's Voice.

I've tried to find a link to a news article but I can't find one, just another blog post about it. If you don't want to click through then the meat of the story is this, a man called Paul Chambers tweeted the following:

"@pauljchambers Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky-high!!"

A week later he was arrested under anti-terror legislation and had his PC, phone and car confiscated.

Now Matthew Wheadon, of The Bearer's Voice, makes the very good point that making inappropriate jokes is what we do and arresting someone for making a joke about blowing an airport up is just not cricket. Even if it is a crap joke.

They confiscated his phone... I don't know about you but having my phone looked at by the wrong people would fill me with dread.

Here's a little test for you:

Take your phone out of your pocket, open the inbox and have a scroll through your text messages. Cast aside the messages telling you to pick up milk on the way home or the texts arranging meet ups at the pub and look at the jokes. Given the recent spate of laws governing who you can and can't slag off that we now have in this country, would you be happy that a copper was having a little root through your phone? Probably not if you, like me, get sent jokes of a sexist, racist, anti religious or just downright "too soon" nature.

When Michael Jackson died Sickipedia crashed. It did the same when Jade Goody finally shuffled off this mortal coil and you can put good money on it happening again if Obama gets assassinated. Sickipedia gets slammed in the MSM for displaying jokes of dubious taste and to be fair the signal to noise ratio can be kind of overwhelming but it does have some gems in there.

The thing is though, and it really is the key point, if you don't want to be offended by crude jokes then don't go there. If you don't want to be annoyed by self satisfied smug media whores who talk about themselves in the third person then don't visit Guido Fawkes' site. I'm offended by MPs and other sanctimonious, self-appointed guardians of the nations moral health but there's not exactly a massive amount that I can do about that is there?

"That's not funny man!"
"Oh but it is. It really is."

So how does every [insert gender/religion/sexuality/ethnicity here] joke start?

With a look over the shoulder.

I'm Sparticus!

2010-11-12T13:29:00.000Z

Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week to get your shit together, otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!

Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

Turf War, Chard Style!

2010-11-08T21:06:00.005Z

When I were a boy, there were few things that would irritate me as much as hearing really old people, like my parents and uncles who were at least 10 years younger than I am now, say things like "I remember when all this was fields" or "a fifty pee piece was a ten bob note and two spanners made a flagon’s knob" or however the hell old money worked.

Except, now I'm starting to see the landscape I remember from my youth alter. And I do remember when all this was fields.

The parts of Chard that were home to marathon games of Bunker123, War and, um, other less civilised brands of hide, seek and fight, are now housing estates. The council estates that were already there when I was a child are getting more crowded too; the back gardens of some streets of council houses are being claimed back and more houses built on them.

Just what Chard needs; to be turned into an overpopulated craphole.

It seems strange then, in these eco-orientated times, that there are people out there intent on making our green and pleasant land, less green and far less pleasant.

ALLOTMENT holders in Chard will see their rents go up by more by 50%.

Members of Chard Town Council voted in favour on Monday night of the yearly rental charge going up by £16 to £26.

Cllr Cathie Morrison said: “The rents have been very minimal over the years and £26 a year works out at about just 50p a week.”

The move to increase the rent fees has been made after the landowner of the allotments put up his fee to the council.

I am not a green-fingered man. Forgetting to take a cup of tea downstairs and the ensuing race for life in the dregs, is the closest I get to growing anything. I can’t even grow a beard for crying out loud! Allotments and other gardening activities don't interest me in the slightest and they probably don't interest you either.

Arrogant councilors who think they can bully their constituents and bamboozle them with rhetoric on the other hand, they have my undivided attention.

Cllr Martin Wale said: “I don’t see why the people of Chard should subsidise the allotment holders.”

Well, Councillor Martin Wale should wind his neck in. He seems to have forgotten that the generation of people that are likely to use the allotments, went to school in an era where Maths wasn't a dirty word. As one Carter Correspondent put it:

Dear Carter,

I'm a massive fan of your blog and think that you should receive money and recognition for writing the way you do. On top of that I think you are extremely handsome and should bring out your own clothing and perfume range.

The e-mail carries on for quite some time in a similar vein, so we'll skip that and get to the meat.

The land in question is two thirds allotments, one third play area.
Rents until now, according to the County Gazette, were:
£960.00 = allotments
£480.00 = play area
£1440.00 = Total paid to landowner

Total paid to landowner after he raises rent as of 2011 will be:
£2200.00
Rents of allotment holders for Oct 2009 - Oct 2010 were:
£14.30 per annum (including water.)
Rents of allotment holders for Oct 2010 - April 2011 were:
£8.00 per 6 months (council wanting to change dates of renting from April to April)
Rents of allotment holders as of 2011 will be:
£26.00 per annum (water included)

Number of allotment holders is between 160 and 170 bringing in rent of :
£4160.00 minimum to the council

Leaving a surplus of £1960, if the allotment holders are paying towards the play area and £2440, if they are not.

The rent hike the allotment holders are getting is obviously not calculated in proportion to the rent hike of the landlord to the council.

4 or 5 years ago there were no council inspections of the allotments. Recently they've started monthly inspections, by council members who have little or no notion of gardening and can't tell a weed from a vegetable.

One allotment inspection was conducted by a woman in stilettos...

They then proceed to write letters to allotment holders telling them to tidy or clean up their plots, costing the council more in administration.

A certain female council member has been overheard remarking that "of course allotments were originally given out to vagrants" and this seems to be the overall disrespectful view of the council to the allotment holders which they have said Chard "subsidises" (see C&I news article).

Yours

Bridget Bardot

This recent attitude change towards the allotment holders by the councillors is curious. Government policy on allotments is clear:

"Allotments are an important feature in the cultural landscape. They combine utility, meaning and beauty with local distinctiveness."

If you are of a mind, go read the whole thing, if not I'll give you the extremely abridged version: The government likes allotments because they're green, media friendly and keep a fair few passionate people working the land rather than fighting in the streets.

Other points covered in the Fifth Report include the vulnerability of allotments, especially due to the inclination of a certain type of person to see an uncluttered skyline as a blight on his wallet.

The Chard Allotments are still on the edge of town and in a very nice, quiet area. A developer's wet dream and no mistake. Seeing as no other developments have sprung up around this site, I can only assume that the site is part of the much vaunted Green Belt.

Who decides what land remains green belt land?

Local authorities do.

Suddenly the attitude shift is not so curious after all.

If it's one thing that's shoved down our throats with monotonous regularity, piety and dubious accuracy, it's the necessity of being green. Turn off the lights if you're not in the room, recycle, minimise your electricity bill, reduce your carbon footprint, drive a mile less everyday and DO YOUR BIT FOR THE ENVIRONMENT!

All manor of hippy dippy stuff that our betters seem to think we should be doing. Until they smell a massive profit that is. Then it's screw you prole, get off that prime bit of real estate and go pound dirt in a window box instead!

The allotment holders have been there for a number of years and they've put no small amount of time, hard work and love into that land.

All that effort and future effort is now under threat and it's under threat from the very people who are employed to look after the interests of the people of Chard.

Ask Not What Your Country Can Do For You...

2010-11-02T18:27:00.003Z

Or rather, if you're the Right Honourable Member for Wolverhampton South West Paul Uppal, go right on ahead and ask what can your country do for you. I mean, it's not as if your country's already dishing out 60 odd grand a year for spurious services rendered...

As much as this blog could do with a mission statement, I'm not going to turn it into Uppal-Watch, despite the rich seam Mr Uppal appears intent on providing. There is at least one other blogger out there doing a far more comprehensive job than I could. I will be keeping an open file on Paul's exploits for an Uppaldate^TM every now and then and unless he does something exceptionally outrageous, I'll just carry on as normal.

This Paul Uppal MP themed post however, was inspired by this:

Click to enlarge and fear for your favourite blogger.
Or me. Fear for me instead.

I bring this to your attention, so that should I disappear, the grieving public will have a suspect to suspect. Before I am the victim of a six o'clock knock; bagged, tagged and shipped off for some of that extraordinary rendition dahling, I shall finish this post.

Sorry.

People arrive at this blog in a number of ways: Other blogger's blogrolls, a bookmark, through facebook (if you are a pal of mine) or from a google search.

In a recent post I did about lying, thieving scumbags Meritforce, I was pleased to see that it had helped a Googler called Debs and I sincerely hope that it helps others in a similar situation.

Other keywords in google searches, that direct to this blog, are "Sam Vimes' Socio Economic Unfainess", "Mind The Windows Tino" and now, "Paul Uppal" is climbing the ranks.

Talking of Google (did you spot the clever segway?!), I do believe our friend Paulo should learn to use it.

We live in a golden age of technology my friends. Never before has so much information, been available to so many. The answer to virtually any question you wish to ask is but a few clicks and a pinch of salt away. I wanted to know what my new MP had been up to since taking office; a combination of Google, Companies House and an e-mail to a mate with connections, soon availed me of that information.

In the olden days, whenever you had a question, you would ask someone who knew. Well, you would ask someone who you hoped would know. If I wanted to know what round Bruno was knocked out by Tyson in their second fight, well, I would ask Al Riste the next time I saw him in the King's Head. His knowledge of boxing is second to none and he is the arbiter of many a bar bet.

Nowadays, we Google.

Granted, some questions are little more complex. For example: To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer what estimate he has made of the number of people in Wolverhampton South West who will be affected by his proposal to change the eligibility criteria for child benefit.

Which was answered with "Information on household income for child benefit claimants is not available at parliamentary constituency level." Which is a resounding "You know full bloody well that we don't hold that info, go and do the sums yourself."

If I wanted to know where to find the drivers for my printer, I wouldn't be e-mailing Bill Gates to furnish me with a hyperlink would I now? Yet Paul keeps asking exactly that type of question, at the highest level.

It is purely to give the impression that he is working hard on our behalf.

The funny but-not-funny-because-it's-costing-us-money-and-this-bloke-is-taking-the-piss thing is, Paul didn't even think of this piece of false representation first! He pinched it straight from Helen Jones (Warrington North, Labour), who seems to be completely obsessed with keeping her expenses secret and not fond of having to explain her spending! Well, she asked three extremely "attack is the best form of defence" style questions today alone. Here, here and here if you're interested.

I've gotta tell you reader, yes it's only you that I'm talking to, there's no-one else here. I've gotta tell you that I'm pretty g-darn far from happy with this state of affairs. Not only is our elected representative only interested in feathering his own nest, he's trying to keep up with one of Blair's Babes!

You better up your game Uppal.

We *ARE* paying attention.

Paul Uppal MP, Wolverhampton South West

2010-10-27T18:19:00.003+01:00

When the incumbent Labour lapdog Rob Marris was voted out of Wolverhampton South West, I celebrated. I never liked his politics or his assertion that my money should be spread out amongst the lazy and the feckless.

Since the election and subsequent formation of the Coalition, I've not really taken any notice of the new chap, Conservative MP for Wolverhampton South West, Paul Uppal.

I met the guy once, at a quiz night to raise funds for him, back when he was first selected as the Conservative Party PPC.

Don't ask.

He seemed nice enough but it was pretty obvious that he'd say anything to get your vote. I remember doing some light googling at the time and coming across some negative comments from some Labour bloggers. He'd been guilty of the crime of deleting comments from his blog. This angered someone to the point of setting up a mirror blog to his called Paul Uppal To Lose. This site, whilst currently still up, was short lived and gave up after a mere 7 number of posts. Paul kept his blog going, right up until his campaigning for the General Election 2010 gathered pace.

It was a fairly innocuous affair, plenty of pictures of Paul rubbing shoulders with pillars of the community, sucking up to David Cameron and, with monotonous regularity, "casual" mentions of his purchase of a season ticket for the Molineux.

Like I say, I remember it being updated fairly regularly up until the baby kissing and vote grabbing but am unable to prove this. For some reason, and I can think of no reason why, the blog has been deleted. Oh well. It wasn't exactly Nightjack and shall not be missed.

It's been a few months since the election and I thought I should, as the protector of all that is right and just in my little world, check in on my new representative.

Depsite my inability to grow a moustache as plush and sexy as Tom Selleck, I set about doing some digging. The first port of call when researching any MP, is the aptly titled and brilliantly maintained They Work For You dot com.

I'm here to tell you people, if Magnum had the interpants back then, he would have spent all day ALT+TABbing between Facebook, Google and Redtube. Solving crime whilst indulging in self love.

So then Paulo, what have you been up to?

First up, he's been asking questions but please, feel free to scroll down to the end of the blue italics. Parliamentise is intentionally dull and a wrist slittingly awful example of what can happen to our beautiful language.

Paul Uppal: To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government whether his Department provides support for landlords dealing with tenants in receipt of rent allowance who fail to pay their rent.

Paul Uppal: To ask the Deputy Prime Minister what steps the Government are taking to reduce the level of electoral fraud by personation.

Paul Uppal: To ask the Secretary of State for Health whether he has made an assessment of the financial implications for small NHS dental practices of Health Technical Memorandum 01-05 on decontamination in primary care dental practices.

Paul Uppal: To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government what effect on levels of revenue the removal of business rate relief on (a) industrial property, (b) retail property, (c) commercial property and (d) office accommodation has had in respect of Wolverhampton.

Paul Uppal: To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (1) what assistance his Department has provided to residents of Wolverhampton South West constituency who have been made redundant in the last 12 months; (2) what steps his Department is taking to assist residents in Wolverhampton South West constituency who are in receipt of jobseeker's allowance to secure employment.

Paul Uppal: To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government if he will reinstate business rate relief for empty properties by 2015.

Paul Uppal: To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government if he will examine the effectiveness of operation of the formula used to calculate the grant to local authorities under the Supporting People programme in respect of (a) Wolverhampton and (b) other cities of comparable population.

Paul Uppal: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department how many failed asylum seekers were evicted from domestic properties in Wolverhampton South West constituency before deportation from the UK in the last 12 months.

Paul Uppal: To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office how many children were living in workless households in Wolverhampton South West constituency in (a) 2005, (b) 2007 and (c) 2010.

Paul Uppal: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what recent assessment she has made of her Department's progress against its objective to complete outstanding decisions on legacy asylum cases by 2011.

Paul Uppal: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department how many asylum seekers who are the subject of legacy cases are resident in Wolverhampton South West constituency.

Paul Uppal: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department how many asylum seekers who applied for asylum in the last 12 months are resident in Wolverhampton South West constituency.

Paul Uppal: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department how many antisocial behaviour orders have been (a) made and (b) breached in respect of those resident in Wolverhampton South West constituency in each of the last five years.

Paul Uppal: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department how many offences involving (a) knives and (b) firearms were recorded in Wolverhampton South West constituency in 2009-10.

Paul Uppal: To ask the Secretary of State for International Development to which organisations his Department has granted aid funding to assist recovery following the recent floods in Pakistan.

Paul Uppal: To ask the Secretary of State for Health what steps his Department is taking to ensure all GPs have access to adequate (a) information and (b) training on care for patients with eating disorders.

Some odd ones there. Trying to look like a hard man on immigration when your sitting in Enoch Powell's old seat, whilst sporting a bit of a tan, certainly catches the eye. Some other very specific questions regarding business rate relief on empty properties, plus other landlordy type stuff, when coupled with his single entry in the Register of Members' Interests, make for Spidey sense tingling reading. More on that later.

I e-mailed an accountant type friend of mine with regard to the company that the member for the bottom-right hand side of Wolves is a shareholder in:

Hello mate,

Doing a post for the blog and I have come across something that seems a little odd, it may just be my layman's eye:

An MP has declared in the Register of Member's Interests that he has shareholdings in this company "Pinehurst Securities Ltd."

A Google of this company, and this MP, shows an article boasting "Uppal, who owns £10m of property in the south-east with Pinehurst Securities, says he went for the British Property Federation role because he understands the politics of property."

Further Googling shows no dedicated website and absolutely no puff. Just the fact that this company exists, is registered at companies house and is located in Dudley. No phone number either. I found an an old phone number which was an 0904 job, designed to rip off people looking for some late night, drunken telephonic love or to put anyone off calling.

Is this strange for a property business? Do they not tout for trade?

It's either the next Watergate or just a damp squib Hahaha!!

Anyway, how's the rash?

Carter

He soon responded:

Nothing unusual here mate. Normal for large property owners/developers to hold things in a limited company.

Tax efficiency, limited liability of the mortgages etc.

The company has been incorporated since 2001, has a clean record on my credit check system, creditworthy, £8m odd of assets in the company. 3 directors, all Uppals (no surprise there)

Phone numbers are not a legal requirement of a company filing and I am not surprised there is no website.

This is a corporate limited liability shell for 3 relatives to contain their property portfolio. Nothing unusual in it. Sensible business and tax control. They would not have any corporate presence as the reality of this is they are 3 independent businessmen, this is simply a vehicle.

Sorry to disappoint.

Also GET ON WITH SOMETHING MORE USEFUL!!!!

I was actually quite pleased with the answer; it's good business to do this when you own property. This at least indicates that the man working so hard for the 60 odd grand a year doled out to Z Factor winners, is not an idiot. He is also independently wealthy, this means he doesn't need my cash and will get on with doing what MPs pimping a blue rosette should be doing; scaling back the state and decreasing that there tax thing.

Paul Uppal: To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government if he will reinstate business rate relief for empty properties by 2015.

Paul Uppal: To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government what effect on levels of revenue the removal of business rate relief on (a) industrial property, (b) retail property, (c) commercial property and (d) office accommodation has had in respect of Wolverhampton.

Paul Uppal: To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government whether his Department provides support for landlords dealing with tenants in receipt of rent allowance who fail to pay their rent.

That's a conflict of interest there dude.

That is a very naughty thing to do and I don't like you using the apparatus of democracy to further fatten your wallet.

It gets worse.

Whilst writing all this and googling harder and faster than Magnum PI ever could, (yeah I said it) I've been beaten to the punch, several punches in fact, by a lefty.

The Plashing Vole, a lecturer at Wolverhampton University by all accounts, has had a raging stork on for Paul Uppal since he was elected back in May. Mr Vole has been making good use of the Freedom of Information Act, sending letters to Paul himself (no reply), Baroness Warsi, the Dibble and the electoral commission and generally holding this slimy piece of parliamentarian to account.

I bet this Vole bloke has a magnificent cookie duster above his top lip.

Whatever.

As it stands, I'm still a Libertarian and I still don't approve of career politicians. He is getting paid a hefty amount of cash to SERVE this part of the world, not to serve himself. He was elected on a tide of anti establishment feeling due to the expenses scandal. To be fair, he's ignoring the expenses and going directly to massive tax breaks for himself!

AMAZING!

Mr Uppal, I'm telling you now, while you still have a chance to do something worthwhile with your time in office; do not let your voters down.

You were not voted in so that you could ensure that you and your family could make even more money. You amassed a more than modest portfolio before you gained office and this current behaviour appears to be nothing more than naked greed. You've been on the Westminster teat for less than 6 months and yet you already appear to be corrupted.

Stop it. Stop it now.

You're making me miss Rob Marris...

The Great Tobacco Heist

2010-10-14T17:43:00.004+01:00

I’m not often stuck for words; those that know me will attest that this is true as well unfortunate, but this article, in regular blog fodder provider The Express & Star, left me struggling with the art of articulation.

Cigarette bins removed after thieves use crow bars to steal butts

Cigarette bins installed in Wolverhampton as part of an £11,000 litter campaign have been removed – because people were using crow bars to rip them open and steal the butts from inside.

Council bosses today revealed there had been daily attacks on the city’s 46 bins, which also collect chewing gum and cost taxpayers £75 to repair each time they are damaged.
The so-called Smart Bins were installed on lampposts in the city centre in autumn 2007, including Dudley Street, as part of a campaign to stop smokers littering the streets with discarded cigarette ends.

They also encouraged people to stop dropping gum on the floor.

But council chiefs said it had become “uneconomical” to keep them in light of the daily attacks as scavengers were prising them apart to steal tobacco dropped inside.

Steve Woodward, head of Wolverhampton City Council’s street scene services, said: “We have had a real problem with people breaking into the smart bins, using considerable force and we assume a crow bar or similar, to get at the discarded cigarettes inside.

“The police were informed. It became almost a daily occurrence and because it costs £75 a time of taxpayers’ money to replace the broken doors, it has simply become uneconomical to continue once our stock of spare parts had run out.

“We weren’t prepared to order new parts for exactly the same thing to happen again. Therefore we have taken the reluctant decision to remove the smart bins.”

He said that the smart bins would be kept in the council stores with the possibility of them being relocated elsewhere in the city if funds ever became available.

It costs the city council around £3 million a year to clear up 4,000 tons of litter and fly-tipped rubbish.

Council spokesman Tim Clark said: “We urge smokers to carry their own container such as a metal sweet tin or cigarette pouch so they can stub out their cigarettes and keep until they are near a bin.”

He warned that fixed £50 fines would be handed out to anybody caught dropping cigarettes on the streets.

The reason for my inability to form a solid opinion and to convey it upon reading this, was not because I didn’t know what to think; it was because I had too many things welling up in my mind to shout about. Which should I give priority?

I think I had better start from the start and try to take this one bullet point at a time.

Cigarette butts are the waste ends of cigarettes and they need to be disposed of. Unlike other waste, there is an issue of actively starting a fire, so they can’t just be slung in with other rubbish. Fine, special bins it is then.

Money should not be an issue where these bins are concerned. Some quick sums show that a twenty a day smoker, pays the equivalent of half the National Insurance contributions of the average worker:

Back of fag packet calcs based on this document which quotes the following:

The rates of duty are:
• cigarettes: an amount equal to 24 per cent of the retail price plus £119.03 per thousand cigarettes;
• cigars: £180.28 per kilogram;
• hand-rolling tobacco: £129.59 per kilogram; and
• other smoking tobacco and chewing tobacco: £79.26 per kilogram.

Soooooo,

20 Marlboro Light are roughly £6

24% of £6 a pack = £1.44

£119.03 divided by 50 (50 packets of 20 = 1000 fags) = £2.38

VAT @ 17.5% on £6 = £1.05

Total tax = £4.87

Therefore £4.87 of £6 = 81%

Duty on cigarettes = 81%

Therefore 81% of £6 multiplied by 365 = £1,773.90 per 20 a day smoker, per year.

The bins shouldn’t need to be anything special either, just emptied every day. There is the question of smell but a lid should suffice in this area. It works for the dog crap bins does it not?

Now, the only reason this article exists is that people, for some strange reason, have been busting these “smart bins” open to get to the gooey centre. In fact, the language used in the article is that they are stealing the cigarette butts. Now that’s an odd choice of word as it applies to rubbish, in a bin, in the street. I really don’t know what to make of the mindset behind that. Smoking is pretty damn expensive these days and if you’re addicted to nicotine and can’t afford it, well, you have my sympathies. But using a crowbar to open them?

Tramps are going equipped now?

Why put locks on them in the first place? The contents are pretty damn rank I grant you and you certainly wouldn’t want vandals spilling dibs everywhere, yet Muttley’s daily output is protected by nothing more than a black rubber lid.

Most odd.

I don’t agree with the singling out of smokers though: Litter is a high crime against the world and its occupants. Whether it’s a dropped kebab, empty tin of Tennant’s Extra, sweet wrapper, old sofa, fag end or any other item that’s surplus to requirements, if you don’t dispose of it properly, I wish you nothing but pain.

Seriously.

If there's a bin right there, bloody well use it or hang on to your crap until you reach one, there are plenty around.

Well, that’s the article dealt with so now for the comments... I really should stop reading them but it’s like watching England play football, you know it’s going to disappoint and upset but you can’t help doing it.

If the article wasn’t bad enough, then the comments section firmly put the kibosh on the chance of anything sensible emanating from my mush. Yes I know, the next time you say anything sensible will be the first time Carter, but either way, comment will be necessary.

11 Pete October 13, 2010 at 1:27 pm
do us all a favour and ban smoking in all public places

13 JJ October 13, 2010 at 3:17 pm
Why are we providing bins so smokers can deposit there (sic) butts anyway. They choose to smoke so they need to deal with what they are going to do with the waste. Same goes for chewers. If littering is a problem then just get more wardens and collect fines off those littering to pay for that.

Jee.
Sus.
Wept.

The jerk of the knee, the reactionary reaction, the open hostility and contempt for people who, let's face it, are addicted and hooked on possibly the most dangerous drug ever invented, just amazes me.

Fortunately for me, on this, the fourth time of asking, I haven't had a cigarette since the 18th of December last year and I'm not likely to. I had a dream the other night that I was smoking again and whilst dreams are weird, screwed up places with little or no logic (or at least, mine are), I remember being absolutely distraught that I was back on it.

Almost to the point of tears in fact.

I can still remember vividly the fear and disquiet that I continued to feel for a good few minutes after waking.

Whilst non-smokers won't understand this, the lucky bastards, the more obnoxious brand of ex-smoker pretend not to and succeed only in ensuring that some people won't quit.

From the first time I realised I was hooked, when I was 14 years old, right through to my first semi successful stint of "being free" at the age of 27, I remember being scared of what life would be like without cigarettes. That right there, the fear, that's the most insidious part of the nicotine addiction. If you back up that crippling anxiety of the unknown with the open hostility showed by the anti-smokers, you get a siege mentality and I don't fucking blame the smokers for that one little bit. I was one once and I have nothing but respect for the people at Freedom 2 Choose and their supporters. Fair play to 'em!

It’s the same old cry time after time "There ought to be a law" and the attitude of the puritans really grips my thing that shouldn’t be gripped. Leave the smokers alone. Your pity isn't required either and your indifference would actually be a refreshing change of pace.

Take your hate elsewhere. If it’s one thing that I utterly, cannot abide, it’s intolerance.

Gamer's Anonymous

2010-10-04T17:48:00.004+01:00

The surge of inventions and technological advancement over the past few centuries has been mind boggling. Or at least, it's been mind boggling to those of us who give these developments a second thought. I have a modest qualification in Electrical and Electronic Engineering, I can wire a plug, I've set up my home so that me and my housemates can enjoy porn, separately, in almost any room and I consider myself to be a fairly competent individual when it comes to technology. That doesn't stop me from using this flowchart almost every day.

When I was in my final year of primary school, we had a computer in the class. It was a BBC Micro and using 9 inch floppy discs we could load one of two educational games. One of these games was called "BANGO!" and featured a balloon which would burst and show the word BANGO! when a fraction was guessed correctly. Somehow, my mate Adam hacked the program, altered the source code and changed BANGO! in to a swear word that a 10 year old boy really should not have known back in 1988.

I'll attempt to refrain from mugging you in Memory Lane whilst I reel off my gamer history. Feel free to borrow these rose tinted specs by the way. My Atari 800XL was superseded by a Spectrum 128K +2, which bit the dust back in '91. I first met Mario and Princess Peach on the NES, ruled at Street Fighter II on my mate Frog's SNES during the sixth form, lost days/weeks to Zelda on the N64 in my early twenties. I have no idea what happened to my Playstation, I've burned through 3 PS2s and today, somehow, have two working Xbox 360s, which do so much more than just play games.

Well, they can stream avi files from the computer but it just feels like so much more.

I've spent many sunny days, alone in my bedroom with the curtains drawn and I wasn't even looking at nuddy pictures of women.

Hello everyone, my name is Carter and I'm a video game addict.

Except that I'm not. I've been a gamer for over twenty years but an addict?

What a truly ridiculous idea and it's only something that could be dreamt up by people with absolutely no concept of personal responsibility. Oh, let’s not forget those shysters who are more than happy to enable them and get paid handsomely for it too.

I made the mistake of listening to the Radio on the way into work this morning. I normally have a podcast of some humorous or interesting bent to entertain me on my morning commute, but this morning I had Radio 1's god-awful News output being injected right into my ear sockets. It wasn't long before I was swearing at the wireless.

This may have had a bearing on my offer, to a gentlemen in a red BMW 5 series estate, to pull over for a chat after I had informed him of the quality of his decision, to pull out in front of me and give me the finger, using the medium of "horn and flashing headlight"^*.

Whether I would have been so keen to debate the pros and cons of pulling out in front of a car with dubious maintenance, brakes and being driven by a psychotic son of Somerset with a complete stranger, had a particular item on "Newsbeat" not enraged me so, is debatable^**.

Counsellors call for more help for 'gaming addicts'

Addiction counsellors have told Newsbeat they're seeing more cases of people worried about being hooked on playing video games.

There are now calls for the gaming industry to offer more support to people who can't switch off.

"Use the On/Off button." Shortest pamphlet ever.

Technology or computer addiction isn't officially recognised as a clinical condition.

Because it isn't one.

But the group representing games companies admits there needs to be more research into the problem.

Groan.

20-year-old Joe Staley from Nottingham says he didn't know where to go for help when he got hooked on console games.

He ended up hundreds of pounds of debt (sic) and dropped out of university: "I know it's an addiction because I can't go a day without gaming.

"Even if it's a flash game on the internet, I can't physically say, 'I'm not going to play anything today'."

Does anyone else want to slap this mouth breather? Joe, listen, your problem is not that you're addicted to video games. Your problem is that you are a moron.

Treatment

Peter Smith is a counsellor at Broadway Lodge in Weston-Super-Mare, Somerset, which started offering residential treatment for computer addiction last year.

He told Newsbeat: "Most of the people that are getting into difficulties tend to be in their teenage years and early 20s.”

And they've not been told to 'turn that bloody thing off and go outside and play' by their parents.

"As that generation moves through and others come on behind, I think the problem is going to get bigger."

People who stay at Broadway Lodge will normally have to pay, although the Department of Health says GPs are able to prescribe treatment for an addiction problem if they think it is serious enough.

I’m sure they are.

Peter says some gamers are showing symptoms similar to gambling addicts or alcoholics.

He thinks there could be a video gaming equivalent of GamCare, a charity funded by gambling companies which offers counselling to people who can't stop betting.

Phillip Hodson, from the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, told Newsbeat: "The video games industry, which is worth billions globally, should research the 'addictive' impact of games playing on the health and social welfare of subscribers while offering counselling support for those who are clearly adversely affected."

Did anyone else translate that as "We have discovered a hitherto unclassified form of Victim Bingo and want taxpayer and private sector cash to celebrate creating non-jobs where there were no non-jobs before!" or was that just me?

Emotive'

Andy Payne is chairman of UKIE, the trade organisation for the video games industry.

Go on Andy, tell 'em to do one!

He insists they're taking the issues seriously but says there's lots of evidence too about the positive effects of playing games.

It’s fun?

He told Newsbeat: "The word 'addiction' is quite emotive. If we're talking about clinical addiction, proven to be something that people want as a dependency, then we have to look at the evidence and the research."

Andy reckons the industry should be willing to pay for more research into the harm that games can cause: "I do think we need more research and we're very open into receiving that. Let's be open and see what's out there.

"If people are finding they've got problems in their lives, and we can help solve those problems, then we should be able to do something positive about it."

Oh Andy, say it aint so! You're listening to these modern day charlatans? Playing video games is nothing like taking smack, crack or thwack^*** in the slightest. For a start, no trip, buzz or high has a pause button.

Dinner getting cold? Hit pause.

The phone ringing? Hit pause.

Bills need paying? Hit pause and go to work.

No such option available if you need to sober up in a hurry, is there now?

When I used to smoke, I would get through 2ounces of baccy in a week. I was fully aware that I was addicted and I would go out for a fag every hour. When it gets to the point that the act of rolling a fag gets you out of breath, that's a pretty big clue that you may need to at least cut back a bit.

I love playing golf but due to work and money restraints I can only get out on the course every so often. It doesn’t mean I’m addicted because I’m not doing it as much as I like. I also would be told to take a long walk off a short pier if I were to ask the golfing industry to help me with my addiction.

It's amazing to me, in this most technologically advanced point in human history, that this idiocy is not only being countenanced, but given air time too. The response to any person's assertion that they couldn't put the joystick down long enough to finish their degree, hold down a job or whatever else they needed to do, should equivocally not be "He's got an addiction and we need to help him." It should be a clip round the ear followed a resounding GROW UP!

It doesn't matter what you do for your jollies, it has to be paid for.

Apparently Tiger Woods is addicted to having sex with beautiful women. You can call it an addiction if you like Tiger, I won't be paying for it through my tax contributions. You will be paying though. You aint tapping that fit ex-missus of yours anymore and dude, she is going to take you to the cleaners in a very big, very expensive and very public way.

Sounds fair enough to me, that balances does it not?

As for drugs, alcohol and cigarettes, the only person capable of deciding how much and for how long you're willing to pay, is you. Or at least, it should be only you that makes that decision.

Video game addiction?

That's got to be the laziest excuse I've ever heard.

^*It's a universal language that can mean "Alright Dave! Look, I'm in a car!" to "You utter &$%^$~#@ **** what the **** do you think you're ******* doing you dozy ******* **** stain on the linen of life?!"

^**More than likely.

^***Thwack is the street name for a drug so addictive it makes Heroin look like Haribo and certainly NOT a piece of slang invented by me purely to aid some alliteration that was going nowhere. You wait till the tabloids hear about
it...

EXCLUSIVE: Bugger All Happened This Week

2010-09-30T17:47:00.007+01:00

A headline in yesterday’s online Express & Star: Police Chase Walsall Metal Thief On Horse and Cart

Wow. Those government spending cuts really are starting to bite aren’t they? I directed my friend, Mr SBD, to this story earlier and he was disappointed about a number of things. Firstly, the lack of washing machine carcass and ageing Ford Sierra up on bricks in the photo and secondly, that it was the pursued on horseback.

“Still the image of the siren wailing, lights flashing, area Beamer or Subaru chasing old Dobbin through the streets of Walsall is worth a moments effort. Do you think they used a Stinger, or a bag of oats perhaps?”

The Express & Star website is one of my long established lunchtime visits, along with Dilbert, Andy Capp and Herman. There would be more but the firewall at work is high and wide and all of my favourite blogs were blocked many moons ago.

The E&S is a bit of a mixed bag. Some stories are funny, some are badly written and some, Wolverhampton murder hunt as body is found for example, are downright terrifying if you let them be. But, like I say, I come back every lunchtime to see just what is going on in my adopted neck of the woods.

I don’t think that the Express and Star is biased toward left or right, at least I haven’t noticed it, and it neatly occupies the space between tub thumping tabloid and allegedly aloof broadsheet. It would be nice if the Mail or The Express could do this but they don’t and are national jokes instead. That said, Wolverhampton is a marginal constituency so why upset potentially half of your target audience if you can avoid it?

I think a lot of this mid-table mediocrity is down to that fact that the E&S is a small local rag, but lucky enough to be in a place where things do happen on a regular basis. It has no shortage of things to report on.

The Chard & Ilminster on the other hand, has no such luck.

As a former resident of that there Chard town I often visit the Tale of Two Cities for an update on the alma mater. All I usually see are stories of marathon running grannies, the latest “initiative” from the local plastic plod and, um, that’s about it.

I know Chard fairly well. I grew up there and I have been refused service in at least half of it’s pubs at some time or other. A lot of my friends are ex-pats too and they also look to the Chard & Illy to see what they’re missing . Every time I take a look, apparently the answer is “not a lot.”

Well Mr Chard & Ilminster News editor, I’ve got some advice for you:

The sports section is mostly good and should remain as it is. You should however, trim the Yeovil Town FC reporting down. Most people in Chard support either Liverpool*, Chelsea or Man United and don’t really care about Yeovil. Apart from the one game a season they actually manage to go to.

When former residents/denizens look at the paper, the bit we go to first of all is the Courts Round Up. We’re not bothered about some half wit in South Petherton getting done for shoplifting. We’re never really sure why that’s in the paper anyway. No. What we actually want is a Pub Fight Round Up. We all know that things get a little boisterous round about 2ish on Saturday night, so do us all a favour and get one of your scribes on that.

Was it just some young ‘uns fighting in the kebab shop queue? One of the Polish Hulks smashing through the language barrier? Or was the big scrap of the weekend a result of the now traditional Chard pastime of Portuguese baiting?

Come on C&I, do your duty.

There Will Be Blood

*This is a strange phenomenon only associated with football. I took a straw poll at Chard Cricket Club one afternoon and each one of the lads I asked supported Somerset Cricket Club. When I asked the same boys what football club they supported, the answers came back as Leeds, Aston Villa, Everton, Exeter (I know), Spurs, Liverpool and Chelsea. How stupid is that? Everyone knows that Wolves are by far the greatest team, the world has ever seen!

Meritforce Doorstep Collection Agents

2010-09-23T18:20:00.006+01:00

Meritforce are con artists
DO NOT contact them
Contact the Office of Fair Trading and let them know, clearly and concisely, what you've been threatened with.
Being a working person in Britain today is fraught with money worries, don't let these crooked bastards steal from you and make it even harder.

Mr M Ark
Carter Towers,
Wolverhampton
WV3 XXX
23/09/2010

Clydesdale Bank Pro 40Bound

2010-09-18T07:00:00.000+01:00

Somerset are playing Warwickshire at Lords today in the final of the Clydesdale Bank Pro 40 and I'm going to watch it.

I am on the train to London and I only just made it in time. Masher very kindly offered to return the favour from the other week and give me a lift. So, at quarter to 6 this morning, as we went to go down Broad Street, we were halted by some metal bollards. He reversed and went down a side street to try and beat the obstacle, problem was though, the last 50 yards were one way.

It was still dark and absolutely no one was about so Masher ploughed on. The policeman that was driving up Broad Street gave us a very sideways look as he slowly continued past. You could almost see him thinking "Isn't that one way up there?" We moved on and when the lights steadfastly refused to change colour after a minute, despite no fricken traffic, we ploughed yet further on.

Those advanced ticket machines are great when they're working properly aren't they? It just would not respond to my jabbing, prodding and eventually, as the minute hand surged ever forward, pounding. As I finally boarded the train, the doors almost immediately shut behind me and we set off. Far too close a call.

I'll be in London by 8 and the gates won't be open till 1. I don't think I needed to save a tenner on advanced travel this badly.

Ah well, SOMERSET! LA LA LA!
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

Freddie Flintoff Has Retired

2010-09-17T16:57:00.002+01:00

Thank you Freddie. It's been emotional.

Fancy a Quick Jerk Of The Knee?

2010-09-17T15:50:00.002+01:00

Quite possibly the dullest thing I’ve ever done has saved me a 20 minutes of my lunch hour, every weekday for the next month. On Wednesday I popped across to Morrisons and bought 20 odd tins of Heinz Spag boll, Spaghetti and Meatballs, various Big Soups and plonked them all in my ped.

Told you it was dull.

During this preprocured time I can run laps around the office, text offensive jokes to my Nan or have a look at the web that hasn’t been deemed offensive by the company firewall.

The Chard & Ilminster News website proclaimed that “Chardstock Street Fayre enjoys an 'electric' atmosphere” and “Annual meeting for League of Friends” and “Somerset CCC ... heartache as Notts win the title” which I really didn’t fancy reliving.

Oh well, nothing juicy in the Tale of Two Cities for today then. How about the Express & Star?

Here at least, the stories, much like it’s readership, are a little more diverse.

Apparently the Charaltans drummer has had a seizure, Walsall council are getting tough with residents over bins, a teenager has mugged an old lady and the shocking revelation that it’s going to get a bit colder soon...

The Express & Star seem to have made a little game up and, I have to admit, it’s one I quite enjoy watching. I think the game must be called “Angry from Manchester” or possibly “Why oh Why oh Why?”

The game is simple: Take a story that concerns banning something, give it a title such as, oh I don’t know Dudley bonfire bangers ban for families, provide scant details such as:

Proposals being put forward next week call for families be to barred from setting off fireworks themselves, meaning they would only be able to watch displays at organised events.

Leader of Dudley Council Anne Millward revealed the plan at the North Dudley area committee yesterday.

Councillor Millward said the move would help prevent anti-social behaviour and injuries caused by people setting off bangers at all times of day for months before and after Bonfire Night.

“They cause so much misery for people, from August until New Year,” she said.
She will be seeking the support of the fire service, police and MPs.

Throw in a quote from a random, outraged and possibly non-existent member of the public:

But grandmother-of-two Chris Attfield, aged 54, of Meon Rise, Pedmore, said banning people from holding fireworks parties would destroy years of history.

“It’s ridiculous. Banning people from using them in their own gardens is too much,” she added.

Enable the comments and sit back and watch the badly spelled and over punctuated comments fly in. Who doesn’t enjoy witnessing the cold blooded murder of the written language, the flagrant misuse of there, their and they’re, the misapplication of to and too and many, many, many exclamation marks.

I’m sure some bloggers play a similar form of the game.

Still as far as the “story” goes, it’s just that; a story. It is low on quotes, leaps a very tall conclusion from a standing start and deliberately incendiary. So to speak. You’ll be telling me they’re banning smoking in pubs next.

It Doesn't Take A Statistical Analyst To Figure That Out

2010-09-11T07:37:00.003+01:00

Some things in life are obvious. So damn obvious in fact, that they shouldn't require taxpayer funded poster, leaflet and pamphlet drives accompanied by multiple television adverts to highlight the issues.

The "Think Bike" campaign has to be one of the most egregious examples of this bearsshitinthwoodedness* that is paid for by us.

If you ride a bike you are vulnerable, so beware of cars, lorries and other traffic. They may not see you because you are smaller, faster and can get through gaps that other vehicles can't. Drivers of vehicles with four wheels need to be aware that motorcyclists own the roads and don't have to observe such niceties as speed limits and not undertaking.

Hardly requires state sponsered education to learn that, does it now?

In other breaking news; the Pope is catholic and waitresses with bigger charlies get better tips.

No really.

(May 7) -- Restaurant patrons might be using their tips to reward cup size more than stellar service, according to a new survey that links a waitress's gratuities to the amplitude of her breasts.

Michael Lynn, a Cornell University professor of marketing and tourism, surveyed 374 waitresses and asked them to assess their physical characteristics, including their breast size, and evaluate whether they perceived themselves as attractive.

I bet he did.

Those with bigger breasts, slender waists and blond hair reported receiving the best tips. High-quality service, Lynn's analysis concluded, had less than a 2 percent effect on tip.

"This study uses a broader array of stimuli as they appear three-dimensionally ... to themselves and their customers," Lynn told the Cornell Sun, adding that his research could help a woman evaluate her "prospects in the industry."

Do you run casting couches for XXX Films as a sideline too Prof?

Lynn also suggested that restaurant managers might be wise to keep his research in mind during the hiring process, because servers who make better tips are more likely to stay at a given job.

"Ugly people are not a protected class, legally," he said. "It is not in fact illegal to hire only attractive waitresses."

God bless America.

And Lynn didn't stop there. The professor thinks his study also indicates an evolutionary tendency whereby waitresses with "large, non-droopy breasts" would attract male patrons because that physique indicates greater "reproductive potential."

Not surprisingly, at least one of Lynn's colleagues isn't happy about his research.

"I am disappointed but not surprised to learn that female servers with larger breasts receive more generous tips," Cornell law professor Sherry F. Colb told the Sun. She suggested that restaurants institute a uniform gratuity rather than "utilizing a pay structure that turns unenlightened customers into the 'boss' in charge of determining a server's take-home pay."

Right on Sister.

This isn't the first time Lynn has raised eyebrows with tip-related research. In fact, he's published dozens of studies on the subject.

"Tipping is an interesting behavior because tips are voluntary payments given after services have been rendered," Lynn told the Cornell News in 2000. "Consumers rarely pay more than necessary for goods and services. Tipping represents a multibillion-dollar exception to this general rule."

At the time, Lynn noted that he hoped his work would help managers "develop training programs and ... policies that increase servers' tip incomes."

And based on his latest research, the gratuity guru might need to expand his list of 12 ways servers can boost tips, which already includes a few suggestions that might go well with his theory on cleavage: "kneel down next to tables" and "touch customers."

This story barely needs commenting on so I'm going to highlight three things and get the hell on with the rest of my day.

1) This bloke has found a way to get paid to ogle woman with nice tah-tahs who bring him food and should accorded hero status immediately

2) That law professor is clearly an old boot or she wouldn't be calling for the pretty to be penalised by sharing out their tips with the fugly squad

and

3) Cornell University must be an awesome place to skive off from the real world.

You have a nice day now.

*If that aint trademarkable then I don't know what is.

Whiskers On Kittens :o)

2010-09-07T22:15:00.010+01:00

Apparently, my last post was a little depressing. Sorry about that. Try and enjoy this series of e-mails, if you haven’t seen them before, that I was sent this morning. Made I laugh at any rate.

Carter.

From: Shannon Walkley
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 9.15am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Poster

Hi
I opened the screen door yesterday and my cat got out and has been missing since then so I was wondering if you are not to busy you could make a poster for me. It has to be A4 and I will photocopy it and put it around my suburb this afternoon.

This is the only photo of her I have she answers to the name Missy and is black and white and about 8 months old. missing on Harper street and my phone number.
Thanks, Shan.

From: David Thorne
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 9.26am
To: Shannon Walkley
Subject: Re: Poster

Dear Shannon,

That is shocking news. Luckily I was sitting down when I read your email and not half way up a ladder or tree. How are you holding up? I am surprised you managed to attend work at all what with thinking about Missy out there cold, frightened and alone... possibly lying on the side of the road, her back legs squashed by a vehicle, calling out "Shannon, where are you?"
Although I have two clients expecting completed work this afternoon, I will, of course, drop everything and do whatever it takes to facilitate the speedy return of Missy.

Regards, David.

From: Shannon Walkley
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 9.37am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Poster

yeah ok thanks. I know you dont like cats but I am really worried about mine. I have to leave at 1pm today.

From: David Thorne
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 10.17am
To: Shannon Walkley
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Poster

Dear Shannon,

I never said I don't like cats. Once, having been invited to a party, I went clothes shopping beforehand and bought a pair of expensive G-Star boots. They were two sizes too small but I wanted them so badly I figured I could just wear them without socks and cut my toenails very short. As the party was only a few blocks from my place, I decided to walk. After the first block, I lost all feeling in my feet. Arriving at the party, I stumbled into a guy named Steven, spilling Malibu & coke onto his white Wham 'Choose Life' t-shirt, and he punched me. An hour or so after the incident, Steven sat down in a chair already occupied by a cat. The surprised cat clawed and snarled causing Steven to leap out of the chair, slip on a rug and strike his forehead onto the corner of a speaker; resulting in a two inch open gash. In its shock, the cat also defecated, leaving Steven with a wet brown stain down the back of his beige cargo pants. I liked that cat.

Attached poster as requested.

Regards, David.

From: Shannon Walkley
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 10.24am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Poster

yeah thats not what I was looking for at all. it looks like a movie and how come the photo of Missy is so small?

From: David Thorne
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 10.28am
To: Shannon Walkley
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Poster

Dear Shannon,

It's a design thing. The cat is lost in the negative space.

Regards, David.

From: Shannon Walkley
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 10.33am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Poster

Thats just stupid. Can you do it properly please? I am extremely emotional over this and was up all night in tears. you seem to think it is funny. Can you make the photo bigger please and fix the text and do it in colour please. Thanks.

From: David Thorne
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 10.46am
To: Shannon Walkley
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Poster

Dear Shannon,

Having worked with designers for a few years now, I would have assumed you understood, despite our vague suggestions otherwise, we do not welcome constructive criticism. I don't come downstairs and tell you how to send text messages, log onto Facebook and look out of the window. I am willing to overlook this faux pas due to you no doubt being preoccupied with thoughts of Missy attempting to make her way home across busy intersections or being trapped in a drain as it slowly fills with water. I spent three days down a well once but that was just for fun.
I have amended and attached the poster as per your instructions.

Regards, David.

From: Shannon Walkley
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 10.59am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Poster

This is worse than the other one. can you make it so it shows the whole photo of Missy and delete the stupid text that says missing missy off it? I just want it to say lost.

From: David Thorne
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 11.14am
To: Shannon Walkley
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Poster

From: Shannon Walkley
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 11.21am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Poster

yeah can you do the poster or not? I just want a photo and the word lost and the telephone number and when and where she was lost and her name. Not like a movie poster or anything stupid. I have to leave early today. If it was your cat I would help you. Thanks.

From: David Thorne
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 11.32am
To: Shannon Walkley
Subject: Awww

Dear Shannon,

I don't have a cat. I once agreed to look after a friend's cat for a week but after he dropped it off at my apartment and explained the concept of kitty litter, I kept the cat in a closed cardboard box in the shed and forgot about it. If I wanted to feed something and clean faeces, I wouldn't have put my mother in that home after her stroke. A week later, when my friend came to collect his cat, I pretended that I was not home and mailed the box to him. Apparently I failed to put enough stamps on the package and he had to collect it from the post office and pay eighteen dollars. He still goes on about that sometimes, people need to learn to let go.

I have attached the amended version of your poster as per your detailed instructions.

Regards, David.

From: Shannon Walkley
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 11.47am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Awww

Thats not my cat. where did you get that picture from? That cat is orange. I gave you a photo of my cat.

From: David Thorne
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 11.58am
To: Shannon Walkley
Subject: Re: Re: Awww

I know, but that one is cute. As Missy has quite possibly met any one of several violent ends, it is possible you might get a better cat out of this. If anybody calls and says "I haven't seen your orange cat but I did find a black and white one with its hind legs run over by a car, do you want it?" you can politely decline and save yourself a costly veterinarian bill.
I knew someone who had a basset hound that had its hind legs removed after an accident and it had to walk around with one of those little buggies with wheels. If it had been my dog I would have asked for all its legs to be removed and replaced with wheels and had a remote control installed. I could charge neighbourhood kids for rides and enter it in races. If I did the same with a horse I could drive it to work. I would call it Steven.

Regards, David.

From: Shannon Walkley
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 12.07pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Awww

Please just use the photo I gave you.

From: David Thorne
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 12.22pm
To: Shannon Walkley
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Awww

From: Shannon Walkley
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 12.34pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Awww

I didnt say there was a reward. I dont have $2000 dollars. What did you even put that there for? Apart from that it is perfect can you please remove the reward bit.

Thanks, Shan.

From: David Thorne
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 12.42pm
To: Shannon Walkley
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Awww

From: Shannon Walkley
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 12.51pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Awww

Can you just please take the reward bit off altogether? I have to leave in ten minutes and I still have to make photocopies of it.

From: David Thorne
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 12.56pm
To: Shannon Walkley
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Awww

From: Shannon Walkley
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 1.03pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Awww

Fine. That will have to do.

Saint Peter Don’t You Call Me ‘Cause I Can’t Go

2010-09-06T13:46:00.000+01:00

So there you are, a huge heap of, let’s call it manure, in front of you and a small shovel in your hand. Scratch that, it’s not a shovel it’s a trowel. In fact it’s a bricklayer’s trowel, which is an inadequate tool for shifting large amounts of horse dung.

This is not to say that it can’t be done, of course it can, it will just take time. Lots and lots of precious time.

What is the point of this unlikely metaphor and what does it symbolise?

Well if you know anything about me, you would probably assume that the mountain of crap is my debt, smelly and towering, and the trowel is my tool for removing that debt, to wit, my salary after paying the bills and procuring vats of Guinness.

It could just as easily be a roundabout way of saying “pick the right tools for the job” but it is, in fact, simply a tortured metaphor of my struggle for solvency.

You may also come to the justifiable assumption that I’m drunk typing again.

Carter Financial Freedom Day looms large and with just another four payments I shall be free of that loan. This will free up a not inconsiderable sum and I have already begun dreaming up ways of spending this cash, this cash that will magically appear in my account on the ides of every month.

Golf club membership, a bed with a comfortable mattress and a headboard, A CAR THAT HAS WORKING SUSPENSION! Ladies and gentlemen, when I own a car with working suspension, free of blinking warning lights on the dashboard, a car that doesn’t require a prayer, a threat and another prayer to start on a cold morning, then I truly shall be living the dream.

Before I get carried away, I remind myself that there are still four payments and that I’m not free yet. I also remind myself that the cosmos has a twisted sense of humour when dealing out the good stuff to Carter Jennifer Magna esquire. Maybe a quick peek at The Spreadsheet of Doom is needed to simultaneously allay my fears and restore some perspective.

Ah.

Oh.

Bugger.

I’d almost forgotten that.

There’s a credit card on here too.

Now, I hadn’t really forgotten that I also had that plastic millstone around my neck, I had just put it to one side to avoid being mentally crushed by the weight. The minimum payment was going out each month and any attempt to make an inroads into that particular pile of negative money was futile so I stopped fretting and resigned myself to my fate. For the last few years, I have been concentrating on the one debt that had a definite ending in sight and it’s nearly here.

But what a waste. What a massive waste of cash being slung at the credit card people every month simply for being in the hole. If only there were a way to stop throwing the good money after the bad decisions.

0% on Balance Transfers...

I don’t know how many times a day I hear or see that phrase but I’ve gotten pretty good at ignoring it. Along with questions that begin “Are you a homeowner?” or “Do you want to consolidate your debt in to one easily affordable monthly repayment?” I’ve learnt to switch off. “They’re after your cash Gord, don’t fall for it” and I remained resolute that I wouldn’t fall foul of these nefarious schemes to keep me skint.

0% on Balance Transfers for 16 months...

There’s a maggot on that there hook alright. It’s big, juicy and couldn’t I ever do with a break from paying interest. In the past couple of years I have easily paid half of the total amount of my credit card balance in interest alone. That’s an awful lot of money.

0% on Balance Transfers for 16 months, apply online...

Ok this is getting ridiculous. I’m starting to feel like Frodo being pressured to put on the Ring here. I don’t know when I started to consider this course of action but I was, not for the first time in my life, wishing I had that bloody Delorean.

My new card should arrive within the next few days apparently and then I shall do the transfer dance and wave goodbye in Agincourt fashion to that bunch of weasels MBNA. I can then start taking slices off of my credit card debt instantly.

It terrifies me just how easy it was to do. I have to keep reminding my self that whilst that maggot is indeed a juicy bugger, it is a properly sharp hook he’s wriggling on.

I must be disciplined and take a pair of scissors to the new card as soon as it arrives. I must ensure that the payments I currently make, are transferred across to the new card and when the loan payments are done, to transfer those across too. Hopefully once that’s done I can start on my overdraft. Oh, the car tax is due next month and the MoT a month after that...

That huge heap of manure? I’d say it was about 16 tons, wouldn’t you?

Sting

2010-09-04T12:48:00.001+01:00

As has been mentioned many times on this blog before, I quite like my cricket, occasionally turn out for Wolves or Chard and am useless with cash.

I've owed my mate Sid 20 quid all season. I haven't been avoiding him but because I haven't been playing due to a knackered ankle, I haven't seen him.

The other day I sent Sid this text:

Somerset have beaten Pakistan by 5 wickets at Taunton next Thursday.

Sid responded with this one:

Good Morning this is Pakistani Radio Sports News............. And 1st we'll start with the Results, for tomorrows game....

Which was jolly sporting of him seeing as he's from Pakistan.

Today I came up to the club so I could finally pay him back. He and the rest of the team are just about to go out to field as I hand him the purple note with a loud "remember; no ball 3rd delivery of the 7th over!"

If looks could kill, I'd be walking with a limp.
#END
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

It’s Just Not Cricket

2010-09-03T12:45:00.001+01:00

A couple of my readers (incredibly there are more than two) have no interest in cricket whatsoever, so I shall warn you now that this is a cricket post.

This summer’s England versus Pakistan cricket series has descended into farce and nobody is going to come out of this looking good.

The revelations came out on Sunday when there were still two, possible yet unlikely, days of play left to go in the test. Watching the match on Sunday morning was a toe curling experience and when Swann took the final wicket I was more than a little relieved. The atmosphere at Lords was deflated, the England team’s celebrations muted and the commentary was very... careful.

Pakistan had ripped through England’s top order, with the exception of Trott, and Broad villaged his way to a large ton. Was that supposed to happen? He was dropped on 10 after all. In fact Pakistan’s fielding has been woeful all summer long, was that the result of a turf accountant’s influence?

Before I dish out my uninformed opinions on this whole affair, a couple of things need to made very clear:

These men are innocent until proven guilty
The Pakistani High Commissioner says that they’re innocent so they must be.

The PHC has been doing the rounds pouring oil on troubled waters. Except that the only way that saying works is if the oil is crude and the waters in question make up the gulf of New Mexico. Pouring petrol on the fire would be a more apt description of the PHC’s words over the last 24 hours.

He said it was not clear "whether they [the videos] were taken before the match" and suggested they might have been recorded after the no-balls had been bowled.

Asked twice whether he believed the three players had been "set up" he replied "yes" both times. In a statement, the News of the World described the set-up allegations as "ludicrous".

In his statement this morning, Hasan said: "They [the three players] mentioned that they are entirely innocent in the whole episode and shall defend their innocence as such.

"They further maintain that, on account of the mental torture which has deeply affected them, they are not in the right frame of mind to play the remaining matches.

"Therefore they have requested the Pakistan Cricket Board not to consider them for the remaining matches."

The man is clearly an idiot and lacking the basic diplomacy skills to deal with this situation. If you’re innocent then you protest your innocence, let the investigation take place and keep schtum. You act with dignity, you do not petulantly accuse the world of being against you.
In one thing though, he is correct: No matter what the evidence is, no matter how clear cut it looks, the fact remains that these three players have not yet been found guilty of, or pleaded guilty to, any of the allegations levelled at them.

That said, I’m going to go with the general flow and treat them as if they have been the very silly boys that they look to have been because this would be an extremely short post otherwise.

Those No Balls were massive, even I wouldn’t go that far over the line by mistake.

It throws the veracity of the whole series in to doubt and does a massive disservice to the England team, the England and Pakistan cricket fans and to the other members of the Pakistan team.

This is cricket and there are certain ways of doing things on and off the field of play. Just lately though, there are too many instances marring the great game. Kevin Pieterson spitting the dummy and the Alan Stanford debacle but to name two.

The PCB needs to grow up and the ECB and ICC need to get a grip on the siruation.

It’s just not cricket is it.

Edited to correct some poor formatting, due to posting via a mobile phone, and correct Stanford instead of Stanhope. Thanks to Wyley for pointing that one out. Well, I do say right at the top of this page that I have a distinct lack of knowledge regarding cricket...

V Festival 2010

2010-09-03T10:18:00.001+01:00

V Festival 2010 – Chelmsford

or

Piss Bombs: A Survival Guide

or

ALAN!!

Last Friday, Masher and I made the trip from Wolves to Mildenhall to catch up with our friends Hedgetrimmer and Tahiti. Last year, Hedgetrimmer bought 8 tickets for V Fest, which was good. He bought 4 for Stafford and 4 for Chelmsford, which was not so good. This year, He’d managed to buy the correct tickets as well as the correct number, so our ranks swelled to include Phil, Shelly, Justin and Becks.

Despite Phil having very little experience towing a caravan and attempting to do so in a car that has less power than mine (no seriously) and the camper van loaded up with quarter of a ton of food and drink, we made it to Hylands Park in good time. With campervan, car and caravan parked, awnings erected and tent pitched, our merry little gang set about the task of getting, um, merry.

There isn’t a massive amount to do on a campsite except listen to music, drink beer and play games. We decided to emulate last year’s success with the cricket equipment, fashioned from a tent pole, electrical tape and some cardboard. This was great fun until I ripped my shorts and Shelly, a bloody girl no less, hit the ball further than the rest of us. Bloody miles further too.

Tahiti and Hedgetrimmer have two little boys and Tahiti’s maternal instincts are honed to perfection. This would become evident many times over the weekend.

“Give me your shorts, don’t argue, and I’ll sew them up.”
“Thank you Tahiti.”
“That’s alright. Now off you go and play nicely with the other boys.”
“Um, Tahiti?”
“Yes Carter?”
“I am three years older than you you know...”
“Of course you are Jumbo” pinches cheek “Now off you pop, I’m going to have some more gin.”

I had brought with me lots of beer, 4 changes of clothes, toiletries and a sleeping bag. When I unpacked the sleeping bag, it turned out to be kiddy size. It’s just as well for me that Hedgetrimmer and Tahiti do treat me as their oldest as they, along with Phil and Shelly, made sure I would be looked after; an airbed and decent sleeping bag was provided for me to pass out on and in respectively.

Apparently, as they made their way to bed that Friday night and I was spark out on the deck, Tahiti was heard to remark “I’ll just tuck him in.” For some people there is just no hope.

Four extra people means four more mouths to feed. This proved to be no problem whatsoever, as the addition of Phil and Shelly meant the caravan’s kitchen came into play. Sausages, bacon, baked beans, fried eggs and bread and butter split across two kitchens soon saw us with lined stomachs, ready for the day’s drinking, I mean, festivalling. I meant festivalling. Yes. Ahem.

V Festival is a commercial venture and makes no apologies for being so. This manifests itself by protecting what one can and cannot take into the arena, most notably, booze. No cans, no glass bottles, no booze and what liquids you are allowed to take in must be less than a litre.

Red wine in a coke bottle looks pretty convincing, as does coke in a coke bottle with vodka or whatever else is your pleasure. What we didn’t take into account however, was the keenness of the boys on the gate. From a good 15 feet away one of the Jamaican lads expertly announced “that’s not coke” and at least four of them were taking a keen interest in Hedgetrimmer and Masher’s drink. I half expected one of them to produce a chemistry set.

Drunk (HA!) with power, these keepers of the Festival’s monopoly on booze were not letting anything through. Except for what the girls had in their bags and what Masher smuggled in down the back of his shorts.

It was daft really because on Sunday, they insisted on patting us down as we walked through. That time we just carried whatever we wanted to take in, in our hands.

Last year the queue for beer tokens took over an hour and a half in the baking sun. This year many more booths had been laid on and the queue took a mere 10 minutes. That was *much* more like it. With beers at the ready we settled down, in virtually the same spot as last year, in front of the 4Music stage and watched The Magic Numbers.

They were alright.

The Magic Numbers were followed by a solo performance by Neil Whatsischops off of The Divine Comedy.

He was alright. Bit weird but alright.

On either side of the stage are very large screens and between each of the acts, adverts are shown. One of the adverts, repeated throughout the course of the weekend, was for Peter Andre and every time one of these adverts came on I booed. I booed with all my heart.

“BOOOOOOO! NO PETER ANDRE, NO. THAT IS ENOUGH. PLEASE JUST STOP. I DON’T THINK I CAN BE ANY CLEARER. BOOOOOOO!”

Whilst my protest was met with general amusement, one fake tan splatted 15 year old girl felt obliged to defend the antipodean irritant.

“Aw leave ‘im alone he’s had a hard time.”
“You have got to be kidding me?!”

Apparently she was not kidding. I swear to Christ; this country is screwed. The fact that the general populace has any sympathy for a failed popstar, who gets taken for a ride by one of the most famous slags in the world *AND* the fact that Jordan is actually celebrated in this country, well, it just goes to show how messed up this world is.

But I digress.

Paloma Faith was next. She asked the crowd if they were here to see David Guetta and a big cheer went up. She then announced “I’m not a fan.” to which the same cheer went up. Seriously, I thought to myself whilst I cheered, crowds of people are so stupid.

She was alright too.

The day wore on, much more beer was drunk, more abuse shouted toward an 18foot high TV image of Peter Andre, Newton Faulkner did some clever accousticy guitar stuff, The Temper Trap were pretty good too and Scouting For Girls did what is they do.

It would be very easy to be cruel to Scouting For Girls, for example:
“We’ve been Scouting For Girls!”
“No mate, you scout for boys and you know it.”

It would be easy to be cruel to them but I won’t because they were entertaining. They sing catchy pop songs that you can all dance along and sing along to dear god what the hell am I saying? It is quite clear to me that we were well on the way to getting drunk at this point because we were singing along to and we did enjoy it.

Anyway, they were alright.

We left the 4Music stage and ventured over to the V Stage where Paul Weller was finishing up his set.

I had missed Paul Weller because I had been singing along to Scouting For Girls...

I shall hand my testicles in at the next Man Meeting along with my membership card. Sorry dudes.

Next up on the V Stage were the Stereophonics and they kicked no small amount of ass. Whilst thingamedoodah from Scouting For Girls could not have looked more pleased/blessed/grateful/incredulous to be on stage; Kelly Jones took it all in his stride. Liam Gallagher on stage comes across as arrogant, which I used to like, but Kelly made Liam look like the red-headed step child with his performance.

Which I find rather conflicting because he’s Welsh and has a girl’s name.

No preamble, no messing about between songs, they had a stag do to get to after the gig apparently, so for a solid hour and ten minutes, the Stereophonics rocked right out. I will however, stand by my assertion that Have a Nice Day is a crap song.

Somewhere in the middle of their set something hit my shoulder quite hard and dumped it’s warm, yellow tinged payload all over me.

Ladies and gentlemen, I had taken a direct hit from a piss bomb.

Masher, Hedgetrimmer, Tahiti, Justin, Becks, Phil and Shelly froze mid point and laugh when they remembered that I have a Donald Duck like tendency to explode. As they held their collective breath, I took the three quarters of a pint that I had in my hand, tipped it over my head to give myself a quick, cold, lager shower.

Trust me, it was preferable to the warm sensation.

Once again, Tahiti’s mothering nature came to the fore; as I stood there, absolutely dripping with recently recycled Carling, she offered me a tissue.

To be fair to her, once the futility of this course of action became apparent she produced a rain mac from somewhere for me to wear instead of a T-Shirt. At this juncture, I would also like to buy the man who invented showers in campervans a pint. Mate, you’re a life saver.

The Kings Of Leon were next but we buggered off halfway through the first song as Hedgetrimmer didn’t want to stick around for the man love. He thinks KoL are a little homo-erotic and it makes him uncomfortable. This left David Guetta on the 4Music stage which I stuck out for all of 2 minutes before leaving to get Sunday’s beer tokens while there were no queues.

Sunday morning’s fried breakfast was just as good as Saturday’s and we headed back into the festival where Plan B was due to start on the 4Music stage.

Despite wanting to punch/give elocution lessons to Plan B whenever I hear him speak, his music is very good. Except that beat box stuff. It’s never been cool and never will be cool. Stop it.

It was far too crowded for me so I sauntered over to the V Stage where the bars were easily accessible and Seasick Steve was performing. A piece of 2 by four with a bit of wire nailed to it shouldn’t sound that good, but it did get my foot tapping and my head nodding.

He was alright.

Once Seasick Steve was done I headed back over to the 4Music stage. This was much easier said than done because I was going against a massive tide of people leaving Plan B and swarming towards Madness. I finally rejoined the gang and we saw Shed Seven (alright), Amy McDonald (never heard of her but alright) and the Eels perform to a virtually non-existent crowd.

The Eels gave a masterclass of doing whatever the hell they wanted, by steadfastly refusing to play songs that anyone knew. They did get round to playing Mr E’s Beautiful Blues to the tune of Twist and Shout by the Beatles, but that was about the only recognisable tune they did.

I liked them for that.

Jamie T was next and there’s something quite unsettling about that boy, his band and their music that I just can’t put my finger on.

Moving on with a shudder, the shout went up for food so back towards the V Stage where, up in the top corner, was the Walls Sausages stand. Their sandwiches and pies were spot the dog and not badly priced for a festival. I had three sausage sandwiches in rapid succession and could have quite happily had a fourth, and possibly a fifth too.

Next door to the Walls emporium of amazingly good sandwiches and pies, was a Nintendo Wii Just Dance 2 tent.

Now I haven’t really mentioned Becks during this retelling of my V Festival experience because, well, if I were to recount everything Becks said it would take a while. She’s a bit of a livewire and this Just Dance 2 tent place was, according to Becks, the best place on Earth. She was in there dancing for quite a while yet she was still bouncing up and down for all she was worth during Kasabian’s set.

Her boyfriend Justin, just looked on in bemusement as his missus followed the instructions on the screen, in time with the Spice Girls.

Oh yes, Kasabian were alright too.

All too soon it was time for the chemical toilet to get emptied and for everyone to ignore Hedgetrimmer’s pleas for an assistant. There’s absolutely no point in rushing to leave the campsites because you’re only going to get stuck in traffic, angry car horns sounded throughout the morning and accompanied our regular breakfast fry up.

One of the things that you don’t see in the campervan site is the carnage that is prevalent throughout the regular campsites where the teenagers dwell; random passed out children who may or may not be dead. Bless their little cotton socks.

It was a cracking weekend and Hedgtrimmer has informed me that he’s already got the tickets for next year sorted out. I for one, very much like last year, can’t wait.

ALAN!!!

The Tweet Smell Of Victory

2010-09-01T11:31:00.001+01:00

Kevin Pieterson's been a silly boy. http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2010/aug/31/kevin-pietersen-england-dropped-tweet

Michael Vaughan had this to say on Twitter:

VaughanCricket Me thinks the tweeting days of England players is about to come to a abrupt ending...

Which was followed immediately by Graham Swann tweeting:

Swannyg66 My cupboards were bare this morning this morning apart from strawberry nesquick. it was the finest breakfast I've had since the age of six

Horses for courses wouldn't you say? If the ECB do push for a ban on Twitter then, to apply reductio ad absurdum, then they may as well ban them from giving interviews, holding an opinion of any form and sew their mouths up.

In other breaking news: Somerset have beaten Pakistan by 5 wickets at Taunton next Thursday.

Post to come on that particular fiasco. Less than impressed.

What Exactly Am I Missing Here?

2010-08-31T11:47:00.002+01:00

Every Monday when I get to work, there are e-mails waiting for me. Some are work related and some are not, thankfully the work related ones are few and far between, I mean, who can deal with anything half complex when the weekend can still be detected at the back of the throat? Not me, that’s for sure.

One of the e-mails that popped up this Monday morning* was the fortnightly missive from Open Europe. Now, Open Europe is an independent think tank campaigning for radical reform of the EU. For more information, you can visit their website www.openeurope.org.uk I don’t often read these things the whole way through, news of the unelected and unaccountable frittering our cash away does tend to get the blood up after all, but the lead item caught my eye.

1. Support for the EU hits a nine-year low

Support for the EU has dropped to its lowest levels in nine years, according to a survey published yesterday. The so-called Eurobarometer poll, conducted on behalf of the European Commission, showed that only 49 percent of respondents from across Europe considered their countries' EU membership a "good thing" - four percentage points down from last year. The level of trust in the EU institutions also shrank to 42 percent - six percentage points down from a year ago.

Meanwhile, 18 percent of respondents considered EU membership to be a "bad thing" - up from last year's 15 percent. (EUobserver, 26 August) The poll also showed that support for EU membership in Germany has dropped by 10 points in only one year, down to 50 percent, in the wake of the eurozone crisis and the unpopular bailout of Greece. In the UK, only 29 percent of people considered EU membership "a good thing", while 33 percent considered it "a bad thing".

Despite the damaging findings, the European Commission still tried to present the poll results as an endorsement for concentrating more powers in Brussels. The Commission claimed that 75 percent of citizens in the EU said they were in favour of "stronger European economic governance". EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding - who is also in charge of Communication - said that "the clear majority for enhanced European economic governance shows that people see the EU as a decisive part of the solution to the crisis". (European Commission press release, 26 August)

However, extraordinarily, the question asked in the poll didn't even include the term "European economic governance", nor did it make any reference to the EU's role in overseeing national economies. It only included a vague reference to "stronger coordination of economic and financial policies among all EU member states". (Eurobarometer EurActiv, 27 August)

This was a blatant and dishonest (taxpayer-funded) attempt by the Commission to spin clearly unfavorable poll results.

Please leave your comments on our blog

You can see why I choose to skim these e-mails first thing on a Monday.

The statistic that caught my eye was this:

[...] only 49 percent of respondents from across Europe considered their countries' EU membership a "good thing"[...]

Which begs the question; just who the hell are the other 51%?

I don’t know anyone who thinks that giving a few billion quid a year to a foreign power is a good idea. Any money received back (which would have been cheaper to keep in the first place, no?) can then only be spent in an EU approved manner.

I don’t get it.

In the UK, only 29 percent of people considered EU membership "a good thing", while 33 percent considered it "a bad thing".

Presumably the other 38% have either got their heads up their asses or are too busy watching The X-Factor** to give a flying one about being subsumed by the ultimate quango, or, for that matter, even know what a quango is.

The 29% must be getting paid by the existence of the EU. They *have* to be.

I watched the film American Gangster last night and, as these things are want to do, one of Russell Crowe’s lines really stood out:

“They don't want this to stop. It employs too many people. Cops, lawyers, judges, probation officers, prison guards. The day dope stops coming into this country, a hundred thousand people lose their jobs.”

Sounds like a pretty damn good analogy for quite a few things that happen in this country too, wouldn’t you say?

*I know it’s Tuesday really but after a long weekend I like to fool myself, throughout the course of the week, that it’s actually a day earlier so that I don’t get the Friday lunchtime itch. Otherwise the clock steadfastly refuses to move past half past 12 with any sense of urgency.
**Which is pretty much the same view.

Edited to fix hyperlinks and correct poor granma and stuff.

ALAN!!!

2010-08-25T21:06:00.002+01:00

I went to the V Festival in Chelmsford at the weekend and got rather, um, pissed...

Yes, that is what you think it is...

Write up to follow, I am still recovering.

Where We're Going, We Don't Need Roads

2010-08-17T14:59:00.002+01:00

There was a meme doing the rounds a while back asking bloggers to write a letter to their 16 year old self. Complete and utter self indulgence of course but then again, this is blogging we’re talking about.

I had a little think about what I would actually write to 16 year old me and that got me thinking about the concept as a whole.

A world with the Flux Capacitor available from Radio Spares or Farnell, wouldn’t just be the preserve of The Royal Mail, ferrying winning lottery numbers back across the space-time continuum. We’d all have the capability to traverse the fourth dimension and the universe would soon pull a hamstring by altering every split second.

Even so, I’m going to entertain the idea that I’m in charge of the world’s only time machine and go speak to little 16 year old me, back in 1993. You’ll recognise the younger me as the one with floppy hair who’s six stone lighter. Apart from that I haven’t changed a bit...

I won’t lie to you, it was an awkward conversation and I really wish I hadn’t hit me when I wouldn’t listen to me. I’m now missing a tooth and flinch every time I catch sight of my assailant in a mirror.

Time-travel paradox grammar is a tricksy mistress and no mistake.

You know the way that kids cringe when you try to be cool? Well that’s purely because you’re old. That would be amplified by infinity because younger you knows with a stone cold certainty you are not cool at all. There’s nothing you would be able to tell your younger self that your younger self would listen to.

Anyway, why should I impart my hard earned wisdom to a spotty little oik who’s only interested in getting his hands on beer, boobs and cigarettes? He wouldn’t listen to word one of what I had to say.

That smoking will do you serious damage* by your mid twenties.
Yeah yeah.
Just stay in if you need to borrow money for a piss up.
Stay in?!
Don’t hang out down by the rec, it’s common.
Ha! You sound like Mum. Anyway, the Youth Club’s shut.
Play cricket or golf then.
Golf?! There’s no way that you’re me. No way at all.
I am
No you’re not. You like cricket and golf, I don’t. You don’t even look like a lead guitarist in a heavy metal band.
Ah. About the heavy metal...
What about it?
I need you to be very careful about the first CD you buy.
I’m getting my stereo next week from the catalogue!
I know, I know. Um. I would very much prefer it if you didn’t buy Skid Row’s Slave To The Grind as your first CD.
But Skid Row are cool. Ugly Kid Joe are cool.
They won’t be in about a years time but it will for ever be the first CD I/you bought. In fact sod this, you obviously aren’t listening so I’m going to go away until the technology exists where I can actually supplant my brain into your body.

But with the aid of a time-machine I wouldn’t need to wait.... And so on and so on. Yes, I do realise that I may have taken the scenic route on this particular departure from reality, but hey, why not?

The one thing though, the one and only thing that I would wish to bang into that incredibly thick skull, would be the importance of having a plan.

Just drifting along waiting for things to happen is not going to cut the mustard.

Want to retire by the time you’re 45? Then be prepared to work your ass off from a very young age. You could have a half decent paying job and do the same thing but, well, that would probably entail a life of nothing more than getting up, going to work, working, going home and eating nothing but birdseed. I mean, where’s the Trill** in that?

Unless those six numbers drop for you on a Saturday night, then it’s a pretty safe bet that you’re going to be on that Hamster Wheel for most of your life. Don’t spend it in a job you hate and don’t be tied to that hateful existence by easily avoidable debt.

Ignore those adverts on telly that say “why wait?” They just want your cash! Live within your means and you’ll be amazed at what you can actually afford, if you can be bothered to wait a little longer.

It’s just a thought Carter. Do what you want, you always have done.

*By “you” I mean younger me. You can do whatever the hell you want to your lungs.

**Sorry

Is it too much to ask?

2010-08-17T12:50:00.000+01:00

Just a little lottery win? An unknown rich uncle dying and leaving me a wedge? How about a small bit of luck involving a rural post office, a stocking over the head, sawn-off table leg in the shape of a shooter, a near sighted postmaster and a clean get away? No?

More work it is then. *sigh*

Professional Status Beckons

2010-08-08T10:55:00.006+01:00

The rain was coming down hard, far outlasting Masher's assertion that it would "only last 5 minutes" by a good ten. We decided that we may as well continue, only three holes to go and we're already wet after all. With that I was on the middle of the fairway of Himley Golf Club's par 5 hole and I had sight of the green.

My tee shot had faded in to the trees on the right, a dink with my 7 iron put me back on the fairway followed by a half decent fairway wood saw me about 180 yards from the pin. A good shot could get me on for 4. I lined up the shot, 6 iron in my hand and took a couple of practice swings.

The rain seemed more persistent than ever but I was completely focused on the shot. One more practice at full bore ought to do it. The world stood still. I brought my club through the back swing to the top of it's arc. Hands, wrists, arms, body and legs in perfect alignment as I brought the club inexorably to the meet the little white dimpled object and send it greenward.

This particular example of Mr Titleist's art remained exactly where it was. My six iron however, was pin wheeling end over end describing it's own parabola through miserable English summer skyline.

I ended up with a double bogey.

The small bottle of beer, a most essential golfing aid.

Carter Has Finally Lost It

2010-08-04T11:37:00.000+01:00

For what I’m about to describe, petty is not the word. I am painfully aware of how childish what I’m about to tell you is, but dear reader, know this: They started it.

Who exactly “they” are is still a mystery to me. It could be one person, it could be a team of irritants, dedicated to driving me out of my mind.

In fact, I’m sure that’s it. They want to drive me into a raging fury, sparking a chain of events that culminates in the loss of my job. With me out of a job, my parking space becomes available. My parking spot must be worth a fortune, it has more oil on it than the Gulf of Mexico.

It matters not, for they will not triumph. Their identity and their motive are but sidebars. By keeping these two things secret they reveal themselves in other ways. They reveal themselves to be cowards and that it what shall lead me to victory.

Granted there are many elements of my working life that, on a low day, appear to be designed to trigger my impending rampage with a stapler and white board marker. These are however, obvious frontal assaults that aren’t deliberate, simply the product of cousins mating.

This latest assault on my sanity is something else entirely.

Someone keeps turning my computer off. There’s some confusion as to whether we’re supposed to turn them off at the end of the day or let them chunter on through the night to let the IT monkeys apply updates as and when. I’ve been leaving mine on so that I can crack on with surfing the net and playing solitaire as soon as I get in. But lately I’ve been getting to work and my PC is off.

I left myself logged in last night, this meant that the only way to power down the PC was with the power button. On this button was a note saying please don’t turn off and yet it was ignored.

I couldn’t believe it. Stunned. I was utterly stunned.

I reached for my Vernier Calipers, took a whetstone to the inside jaws and let the paranoia engulf me.

My tormentors are indeed tormenting me. This isn’t the action of an eco enthusiast, that kind of tree hugging sap would just ask me to turn my PC of at night. No. This is blatant psychological warfare being fought in a most underhand way.

There’s only one thing for it: I’m going to disable the on/off button.

They started it...

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You know you're getting old when

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Set An Idiot To Catch An Idiot

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Ever almost want someone to mess with your stuff?