I am not a musician, but if I were a guitarist, I might fancy one of these. I like the one with the teeth.
(Via Gizmondo).
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Earlier this evening I was reading the on-line Telegraph and clicked on a link about a Taliban leader being killed in a NATO air strike in what I assumed was going to be Afghanistan… and to my surprise I ended up at an article about the interminable queues at British airports! So this NATO air strike against the Taliban was where exactly? I looked again a bit later and the links were appropriately sorted out but as someone who has just passed through the nightmare that is Heathrow, for one glorious moment I thought some public spirited member of the armed forces stuck in one of what Adriana calls “the security theatre queues” had snapped and called in a long over due air strike on Terminal 2. August 4th, 2007 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Whilst it is fun to laugh at the French, in the interest of fair and balanced commentary I should add that this civil servant would find numerous employment opportunities in any of the world’s government sectors. July 20th, 2007 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
Ecogeek reports:
It is all very well training executives in communication with the media. Somehow I have a feeling that if the guy was allow to talk normally instead of using the pseudo-technical press-release talk, this might have been avoided.
Now please excuse me whilst I clean the tea from out of my keyboard. July 15th, 2007 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area – UK military spokesman Major Mike Shearer.
(via Alec Muffet) July 14th, 2007 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Via Reason magazine’s Hit & Run blog, here is this rather amusing item about how French motorists with clean driving licences sell their speeding points online for a fee to drivers who are in danger of using up all their points and then getting banned. Yes, yes, I can see the usual Dudley Do-Rights out there bleating that this is all terribly naughty, a sign of decadence, blah, but in fact what this demonstrates, in a slightly naughty French way, is how if you oppress people enough with laws and taxes over a period of time, it breeds such disregard for the law that even laws that have sense – and driving very fast can be bloody dangerous – get spurned. (It appears the French are smarter at getting around certain rules – look at what happened to former Spurs, Manchester United and England player Teddy Sheringham for allegedly trying to pull the same speeding-point move). I have driven a few times along France’s magnificent, sweeping autoroutes, and am occasionally reminded that France invented Formula 1 motor racing. Maybe there’s plenty of life left in Gaul yet. If only they could do capitalism in a slightly more routine way. Talking of such alternative markets, here is an old article about the market in air miles. July 14th, 2007 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
BBC Farming Today naturally took an interest in how the new food and rural affairs minister, Rt Hon Hilary Benn MP, who is a vegetarian (thus “Veggie Benn”, his father having been “Wedgie Benn”), would get on with livestock farmers. This morning an interviewer probed his convictions: – BBC: Why are you a vegetarian? Benn: I am a vegetarian – and I have been a vegetarian for 35 years – because of a personal decision I took not to eat meat. A classic piece of political honesty, I hope you agree. [An exercise for title wonks: He is ‘Rt Hon’ now, since he’s been in the cabinet for a while, and thus a Privy Counsellor. However, was he ‘Hon’ before that? Wedgie Benn disclaimed his viscountcy, which will revive on his death. Not that they would, but are his children entitled to style themselves “The Honourable” in the meantime?] July 3rd, 2007 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
Scanning various news websites this morning, as is part of my routine, I came across this article over at Reuters. Scroll down and you will see that the item refers to a person commenting to the effect that car ownership is “immoral”. Think about that: ownership of a piece of metal, with wheels at each corner, that conveys people from A to B by the harnessing of controlled explosions in something called an engine, is immoral. Not unwise, costly, difficult or impractical, but “immoral”. Maybe these creeps will next argue that Man’s possession of opposable thumbs is “immoral” too. June 29th, 2007 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
Among the rank-upon-rank quangocrats and glorious anomalies of the Queen’s birthday honours, I was struck by an example of the coyness that draws attention to itself: OBE – William Anderson; Grade B2, Ministry of Defence; London. No citation. No location. All other London awards carry the postal out-code (e.g. “SW1A”, “W8”) of the recipient or their office. Grade B2 is a junior executive grade, and one usually only gets an honour for being head of something, even in the civil service. This all stands out as odd. So why do it? If Mr Anderson’s work is too secret to mention, then it seems just a tad silly to go to great lengths not to mention it in this ostentatious way. It would have been easy to invent something boring that insiders would know to be a cover story (most fellow OBEs are getting the award for work in organisations no-one outside them will have heard of before). Or the honour itself could have been made secretly. June 16th, 2007 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
There’s a new social trend in Belfast whereby women are dropping their children off to school still in their pajamas. This has got the local worthies of Belfast worried, and a little peeved.
Bloggers, who of course are famous for working in their pajamas, should rally around the millies, and defend their right to drop off their offspring at school, no matter how unsightly it may appear. First they came for the millies…. June 9th, 2007 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
In the early 1980s, American telecommunications company AT&T commissioned management consultancy McKinsey to conduct some research into the newly invented mobile phone. How large was the market for these new devices likely to be? In a report that now makes hilariously funny reading, McKinsey predicted that there would be a world market for about 900,000 of these devices*. This led to AT&T initially not investing in the new technology. In 1994 they entered the business by buying the mobile phone business created by Craig McCaw, and after an assortment of forwards, reverse, and sideways takeovers this business lives on as AT&T Mobility today. It is possible to compare this number with the actual size of the world market for mobile phones – there are now around three billion active mobile phones in the world. That is straight and to the point. However, other kinds of comparison perhaps better illustrate just how wrong the prediction was. For instance the number of phones that McKinsey predicted would make up the world market is almost exactly the same number of phones that Britons accidentally dropped in the toilet in 2006 (* For the sake of honesty, I do have to point out that McKinsey actually did make that prediction of 900,000 as the size of the market “for the year 2000”. Yes, they did pretty much choose a year randomly and they were predicting 900,000 on a “that’s pretty much everyone who will want one” basis, but it must none the less be mentioned. In any event, there were about half a billion mobile phones in the world by 2000, so they were still out by a touch) June 6th, 2007 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
The new logo for the 2012 London Olympics has been unveiled and it has produced howls of outrage. Yet I beg to differ. I think it is perfect.  What does it look like to you? To me it is obvious: a collapsing structure of some sort, perhaps a building at the moment of demolition. The sense of downwards motion towards the bottom of the page is palpable. Breathtaking. I mean what truly magnificent symbolism. The entire Olympic endeavour has been a massive looting spree with already grotesque cost over-runs (and it is only 2007), so surely something that conjures up images of collapse and disaster is really on the money… and speaking of money, at £400,000 (just under $800,000 USD) for the logo, it perfectly sums up the whole ‘Olympic Experience’ for London taxpayers. No, if ever there was ‘truth in advertising’, this is it. Well done Lord Coe, I salute you. June 4th, 2007 | 74 comments - (Comments are closed)
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Not often you see a remark quite like that.