I expect they are chosen at random...

moar funny pictures

In an earlier post I told you about the monster in our hall...

As you can see, the combination of our telephone system, the wireless router, network storage box, phone link to the Sky box and Ethernet link via the mains to my Linux machine made an ugly mess in our hall. My brother Nick makes customised furniture for people who want it, and are near enough to Bridgwater in Somerset.

We discussed what was needed, and he went off and built it. We fitted it on Monday, but this is the first chance I have had to blog about it. And this is the result...

All that untidy stuff is still there, of course...

But now, it is hidden, and we are absolutely delighted with the results.

Yet another link to Nick's web-site.

We have to allow for rubbishy translation, and bad reporting, obviously, but what we hear is this... (I believe some call it "the old bait and switch")...

BBC: The Roman Catholic Church says marital fidelity and sexual abstinence are the best way to prevent the spread of HIV.

That's the bait. He says something so obviously true that nobody can think of an argument against it. This is supposed to make you believe that he is infallible. Then, the switch...

Benedict XVI, who is on a tour of Africa, said handing out condoms only increased the problem of HIV/Aids.

No, Popey, it bloody does not. If people who are about to have sex with a non-wife girlie put rubber johnnies on, stupid bloody Popey, it stops the virus. So, dopey Popey, if somebody does "hand out condoms", and if people use them, it will prevent the spread of AIDS. Dearie me, how difficult was that to understand? I'm not infallible, but who can find a genuine problem in that?

Yes. Only have sex with your wife, and if she has only had sex with you, neither of you has got AIDS. It doesn't get any more obvious than that, and Jesus wasn't needed at any point in the argument.

But. Simple obvious truth is not enough for the Pope. You were doing fine using your common sense, your brain, but he wants control of your mind, matey. And he hates the idea of any possibility of a reduction in the number of Catholic conceptions, as latex is never mentioned in the book his predecessors borrowed from the Jews, mistranslated, amended, edited, and then lied about. So he stands right there, and he opens his mouth, and he tells huge lies. Monstrous great big huge lies. Pope! I call liar!

The Pope is infallible? I can't help thinking I saw something about him being a member of the Hitler Youth at one point. Apparently you can get away with that if you had your fingers crossed, so as not to be killed by the nutters with guns, which is fair, but has he ever said sorry, even once? No way. Only popes can pontificate, I suppose. If you can think for yourself, you don't need them.

Tomorrow, the Muslims. Next week, Reiki, Tarot, general New Age shite, and the Conservatives. One hopes one will be on a roll....

You also won't believe these twenty ridiculous complaints made by holiday makers.

You won't believe some of these stupid questions asked by tourists.

You don't want shares in a company that is going to throw away a successful business just to make Mark Hurd even more wealthy than he already is.

You don't want shares in a company that is dragging failure from the jaws of success! When profits have been rising, because of the efforts of the staff, attacking those staff with pay cuts is not what the shareholders were asking for. It is stupidity.

Hewlett Packard is being stupid, and while its staff and the people at EDS are being rewarded for making more money by having their pay stolen to add to Mark Hurd's obscene bonuses, HP is going to find it no longer makes money. EDS staff worldwide are saying they just won't take it. In countries where you can be in a union, and strike, they will. Why not? Some of them have been years without a rise, and now cuts? They won't take it.

If you have shares in HP, understand this. Your shares will soon be dropping in value. You better sell now.

[I know, I'm no brilliant financial analyst, but this guy is, and you can see by the comments he is getting that HP and EDS staff have had enough. Goose, golden egg, remember?]

We have our spammer back. You will notice that Female NY 30 keeps generating new names, but runs the same tired old scam. I suggest you do not click on the image, it won't show you a porn video.

Yes! David "Giant Brain" Cameron has solved all our problems forever!

If the TV licence doesn't go up until next year, the global economy will immediately recover. Thank Krishna for Eton. How we have managed for so long without this genius...

I can't go on. Sarcasm isn't nasty enough for this twerp and his useless party, and abuse is so horrid.

I just saw a report that Cisco, the network giants, are to sell servers in competition with HP.

They should win easily, as all the guy in charge of HP knows how to do is cut staff, cut wages, and increase his own bonus.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Tough-guy actor and martial arts expert Chuck Norris sued publisher Penguin on Friday over a book he claims unfairly exploits his famous name, based on a satirical Internet list of "mythical facts" about him.

Click the quote to see Reuters' story in full.

The book is called "The Truth About Chuck Norris: 400 facts about the World's Greatest Human". For some reason, Chuck is not complaining about the claim that he is the World's Greatest Human.

I wonder if he has heard about this one yet...

Yup, you get 16 days in jail if you kill somebody by smashing into them while sending five text messages in 17 miles. Then you get out on appeal. If you are a "Lord".

Lord Ahmed's barrister, Jeremy Baker QC, had argued the jail sentence could "irreparably and permanently" damage Lord Ahmed's ability to carry out community work in the future.

Do we actually need the kind of "community work" this turd might perpetrate?

Here's an interesting web site that tells you how many people in the UK have the same name as you. Click my graphic to go to the site. I assume it is using data from the Register of Electors, so the answer will be the number of adults who have registered to vote, and can spell their own names.

I'm not sure whether to be annoyed at all the other people with the same name as me, or to rejoice in the semi-anonymity that comes from having a non-unique identifier.

What does irritate me is the name of the web site. It really ought to be YOU'RENOTME, but I understand apostrophes cannot be used in URLs or within a certain distance of Birmingham city centre. So it should perhaps be YOURENOTME. That would make sense, as it would be saying "You are not me". But YOURNOTME can only mean "The not me that belongs to you", which is just incomprehensible.

Thank you, Sky, you have improved my day.

When I logged on to eBay yesterday, I saw this...

The shock was not that I had been on eBay for so long, but that they still have nobody who checks to see if things they are going to display make sense. Without the apostrophe, it doesn't.

"Of, or belonging to it, been six years..."

I happened to comment on somebody's tedious advertising blog just now, and I seem to have upset them... First they did this:-

The blog owner changed your comment from:
It must be really good if it has to advertise by spamming free blogs.

to the following:
It must be really good!

Then they thought more carefully, and just deleted it. You should not comment adversely on their cheapskate advertwell thought out blog post, obviously, as you might upset them.

So there you have it. Sometimes I do join in with the fun stuff, as well as ranting about politics. And where was my Bloscar nomination? Sniff...

Instructions...

1. Go to "wikipedia." Hit “random” or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2. Go to "Random quotations" or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

3. Go to flickr and click on "explore the last seven days" or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

From the BBC's article on the theft of the Post Office pension scheme...

For 13 years, from 1990 onwards, the Royal Mail - in common with other large organisations - made no contributions at all to the old pre-1987 section of its scheme, in a grand contribution "holiday".

It should have been paying in money at a rate of 9% of salaries per year.

Ostensibly this was to avoid running up a very large surplus, which was a very common phenomenon in final salary pension schemes in the early 1990s.

But the saving of £1.5bn over that time - when staff were still paying in 6% a year - rather neatly covered the £1.3bn that the Royal Mail paid back to the Treasury during that time in an annual dividend.

If that money had been steadily invested over the past 19 years, there is little doubt that the scheme's deficit would be far smaller now.

If the £1.5bn of annual payments had been invested in shares and bonds over those years, and had grown at an average annual rate of 6%, including dividends and interest, then the fund would now have an additional £3.1bn.

Thatcher started it. Her government began the theft, scumbag Blair did absolutely nothing to stop it, and I don't doubt for one second that if I looked further I would find Mandelson's grubby little hands helping themselves to as much as he could grab.

Things have come to a pretty pass when I have to read the Daily Mail to find out just how disgustingly the Labour Party have behaved in their attempts to destroy the Post Office.

Handing business to private delivery firms, on purpose, to make things worse is a pretty nasty tactic. But of course it will have increased profits for those firms, and let's face it, most cabinet ministers these days have non-executive directorships with those firms, and get bonuses and fat salaries from them.

Corrupt, Labour? You bet they are.

Business minister Peter Mandelson warned unions and party rebels on Sunday that their opposition to the part-privatisation of the Royal Mail could cost Labour votes at the next general election.

Yes, Mandelson, you stupid bastard, you are going to lose votes over this. And if you force it through, you will lose even more.

After all, who needs a Labour government that just does what the Tories would have done? If you are going to come in destroying things, the way they did, and spouting stupid, arrogant tripe like "There is no alternative", the way Mrs Thatcher did, then you are not the people we need in power.

Clare Short, who had too much integrity to remain in the Labour Party, has revealed what nasty Jack is covering up - there was no discussion in Cabinet about whether we should follow Bush's orders and kill thousands of Iraqis, and lose rather a lot of our own soldiers.

No discussion. Blair showed them a bit of paper written by a so-called lord, and said "That's it".

Yes, I know, it's in the Mail, but you can bet it's true.