I didn't quite catch that...

Well over 100,000 dead after the earthquake.

Yes, it’s Christmas. Yes, money’s getting tight. I don’t care.

Give Give Give.

Still offline, so I’m at home home for a few hours to do some stuff and I thought I’d do this as well.

Guess who moved house today. Oh yeah, that would be me. Which meant that a) I’m now me own landlord. And b) I got to play about in a large van. Which was amusing.

It does mean that I’m without an internet connection in the house, so I’m at home home to do a few things. One of them is checking email, etc, and waffling on the old blog.

I don’t know how I survive without a net connection in the house, though. It’ll take ntsmell ages to get the modem installed. What will I do? Aargh!

It looks like over 23,000 people have died following the Asian earthquake. I can’t even begin to comprehend those sorts of numbers.

Michele has a list of ways to help. Not much more that I can do, but thats the way of the world.

Well, we had a white Christmas. And a few drinks to celebrate it. So all was good.

Hope it all went well for the rest of yez.

It’s the same old message, but I find that sticking to the old’uns is the best.

Happy Christmas, to the lot of you.

Apparently, there’s not very many of the vans used in yon robbery about these parts, so the cops took two days to get one for the reconstruction.

   

Excuse me? You can’t move for them. Of course, they all have general health care trust livery. Dozens of them in use in the health service. So there’s one posible source of the van for yez all to investigate.

Told ya I was a brilliant investiagtor.

I occasionally read The Coppers Blog, because I generally find that he speaks common sense and highlights the stupid dependency of the UK public sector on forms.

Today, he linked to PC Woody. So I went and had a look at said blog. And got very annoyed. Why? Because of this bit of the post:

I mean what other job can you have a suited and booted director of a company shaking and quaking in his shiny shoes for being caught by me and Bart driving whilst using his mobile phone. I enjoy that and have no problem issuing tickets for that as anything that makes people drive less carefully and could cause an accident will be dealt with quite harshly if I have anything to do with it.

That attitude pisses me off something chronic. “I enjoy that” and “anything that makes people drive less carefully”. FUCK OFF YOU TRAFFIC NAZI.

If you can prove that, in that specific case, that person (who you enjoyed scaring) was paying less attention to the road than they otherwise would be, then booking him was the right thing to do. However, you can’t, so don’t even bother trying.
Instead, you’re relying on a piss poor law, which is relying on piss poor science, to take more money from the motorist. Which is fucking brilliant. Good on ya. I can’t possibly think why people are losing faith in the police when this attitude is so obvious (and not just on the blog, but in most cases you’ll hear of).

And then we have this fella. Whose standing and employment are in doubt following fucking letter-perfect enforcement of fucking stupid speeding leglislation.

Spot on. The sooner someone realises that relaxing driving legislation would win votes by the bucketful, the better.

Bastards.

There’s a girl on the radio at the minute, asking for the advice of the listeners to the Colin & Edith show.

Her dilemma is this: she’s got five guys on the go at once. She’s not that fond of any of them. So she wants to break up with them before Christmas, but still wants all the presents.

My views:

• First off, greedy bitch. I don’t think that I need to elaborate on that one.
• Secondly: a tad heartless, perhaps. Only a tad though. Honest.

My suggestion: break up with them all tomorrow, accept that you deserve no presents, and suggest that a visit to the local GUI clinic may be a wise idea.

Any better suggestions? Or has everyone buggered off home?

New York comics threaten strike

Sounds serious.

Three points stand out from the story:

They say rates of $75 (?40) for weekend sets and as low as $15 (?7.80) for 20-minute weekday sets are beyond a joke.

“We’ve been making the same wage since 1985,” said comedian Ted Alexandro, who added drinks and admission prices had soared over the past 20 years.

“A comic working 12 to 14 shows a week grosses barely over $20,000 (?10,420) from the New York clubs,” he said.

I can definately see their point on this. I can also see that their wage works out at $45 an hour of work done for each club, which is a bit more impressive.

But former comic Chris Mazzilli, who owns the Gotham Comedy Club, said he had to pay for six or seven performers plus an MC on a weeknight when it could not be sure of filling his club.

“Clubs cost a lot of money to run,” he said.

“New York City is different – your rent factor is much higher and your insurance is much higher.”

I can also see this point. But still, seven times $15 is only $105 for a night’s entertainment. Which is pretty cheap.

Obviously, there a fair amount of room for negotiation in there. Which is all good. Everyone happy, everyone laughing, and the situation is resolved.

But the third point is what drew my attention:

“The comedians formed a coalition so that our concerns would be addressed collectively,” said co-founder Russ Meneve.

“Three hundred comics cannot be ignored.”

Excuse me? Bet ya that they can. It’s not like it’s a closed shop industry. And there will always be budding comedians about the place willing to take over empty slots and willing to work cheap. I think that the whole campaign would have worked much better if the word “strike” had been conviently left out of the publicity. Or the comedians could find that they’re laughed out of business.

The whole tacky American habit of putting up extravagant Christmas displays is here in force. Now, I’m all for a bit of Christmas cheer, and a bit of colour is fine.

But some of these stories are just nuts.

The display, which uses 1.2 million bulbs and ?50,000-worth of decorations and equipment, can be seen for two miles away.
..
Mr Meikle’s display needs to run through two industrial-sized electricity meters as it uses up too much power for a domestic meter – one year, he says, the display melted the main power cable supplying his village.

He is expecting an electricity bill of ?4,000 to ?5,000 for the Christmas period.

Holy shit. He melted the leccy cable for the street. He gets 3,000 kids visiting a weekend. He has 1.2 million bulbs.
Bet he’s popular round the neighbourhood, anyway.

Of course, there are also benefits from these things:

The amount of power used by the larger displays means they cannot be good for the environment.
…
An Energy Saving Trust spokeswoman said: “It’s really difficult to talk about it without it sounding like bah humbug.
…
“We would advise people to try to counteract the amount of energy they’re using on the outside of their homes by changing their bulbs inside to energy efficient ones.”

WooHoo! It pisses off the enviro-menalists! More! Bigger! Brighter!

Heh. NIrish headlines topping the bill at IMAO. Sure, it only took a little crime to get there.

An email has just been sent round our department:

A sum of money has been found at the *** area of *** ****.

This is held in *** **** *

Oh really? And you’re expecting us to believe that thats totally unconnected to this? The evil plan is in motion, obviously. Laundering the money and leaving it ‘lying’ around the place for your accomplices to pick up?

Your plan is foolish, people.

soc.culture.irish. Where you cen get such nasty stereotypical ‘jokes’ as these:

2 ballymena ducks walking across the road one goes “quack quack”
The other one says “I’m goin as quack as I can!”

Or this tale of the castration of the RN:

Nelson (reading aloud): “England expects every person to do his duty, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, religious persuasion or disabilily”. “What gobbledygook is this?”

Hardy: “Admiralty policy, Im afraid, sir. We’re an equal opportunities employer now. We had the devil’s own job getting ‘England’ past the censors, lest it be considered racist”

Nelson: “Gadzooks, Hardy. Hand me my pipe and tobacoo.”

Hardy: “Sorry sir. All naval vessels have been designated smoke-free working environments.”

Nelson: “In that case, break open the rum ration. Let’s splice the main brace to steel the men before battle,”

Hardy: “The rum ration has been abolished, Admiral. Its part of the Governments policy on binge drinking”

You get some very strange people in yon newsgroup.

Now that’s what I’m talking about…

The new Rachel Lucas. She promises that there will be the old bile. The doggie goodness is already there. But there is something more.

Yes, there are girlie pics. Her justification:

That’s the great thing about being a girl blogger. We can post photos of other women, point out their attractiveness, and move on with our day, leaving at least 75% of our readers with a smile. Beautiful.

Without appearing to be an old perv. Not that being an old perv is bad, it’s just that the fuddyduddies tend to charactarise it as a little distasteful.

USS Clueless is permanently off the air.

SDB, you’ve been missed. You helped shape the future of blogs.

So long, and [add totally inappropriate hg2g reference]

I just noticed that my last post was number 1,499. Which means that this is my 1,500th post.

Which is a lot. Works out at an average of 2.something posts a day for the nearly two years I’ve been doing this.

Oh well.

Up to ?30 million has been stolen from a bank in Belfast.

?30m. Thats about 19 quid for every man, woman and child in Norn Ireland. That is a hell of a lot of money.

Hostages were taken, but it seems like they’re all OK now. Which, as the bank says, is the main thing. But thirty million squid! Like it won’t be noticed if anyone round these parts has a few million today that they didn’t have tomorrow. How would you even go about getting rid of that kind of money?

Disclaimer: Joe, I know I said yesterday that I’d probably end up stealing the private military. This is not part of that, m’kay? I’ll be stealing that directly, not stealing-to-buy.

Out of 659 MPs, only 93 – 93 – had the testicular fortitude to stand up to the government ID bill.

93.

More Labour MPs than Tories voted against it. Fucking spineless bastards.

I don’t suppose anyone is familiar with the concept of “opposition”? The only brake put onto a party in government? Especially when that party has castrated the House of Lords and actively undermined the judiciary?

No? I didn’t think so. Just because Howard wanted one of these farking cards last time round, we’re all going to be stuck with having to dream up imaginative ways not to carry them.

Bastards. Fuckwits. Bandwagon grabbing whores.

Not that I’m a trifle annoyed, or anything.

It seems that there’s a spate of firebombings going on over here. It looks like five incendiary devices have been left in large commercial premises over the last few days, destroying two of them.

So what’s happening? They seem to be concentrated on DIY and home improvement shops, all over the province. I haven’t heard anything about demands or that sort of thing, and the BBC isn’t mentioning any. Don’t mean that none have been made, though.

Here’s what it looks like to me: Lewellin-Bowen, distraught at the cancelling of Changing Rooms, has struck out, and has done it over here to divert suspicion.

Hercule Poirot, look out. A new investigative champion is about.