I didn't quite catch that...

You know when I asked what did I miss? Youse all weren’t very helpful.

For example, nobody informed me that Humph had died.

For reasons mentioned here, Humph was the perfect straight man for the lovely lads on ISIHAC; and as such I can’t see him being easily replaced.

‘course, he had a hell of an innings, what with him still setting up perfect double entendres for the nation at the ripe old age of 86. So I suppose we shouldn’t complain too much…

RIP Humph. I can’t wait to hear the announcing of guests at the funeral…

United do so like to make the last few minutes of European games interesting, don’t they? A helluva game, a helluva goal, and United are through to the European Champion’s League Final. Which is nice…

The downside is that I missed seeing this rather special event.

Ali Carter fired a superb 147 to become the second player in this year’s World Championship to claim a maximum break.
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It came just a day after Ronnie O’Sullivan’s maximum and is the first time there have been two 147 breaks in the same ranking tournament.

I’ve always wondered what would happen to the prize fund if two 147s happened in the same tournament… It seems that – unfortunately for those involved – they get to split it.

O’Sullivan will now have to share the £147,000 bonus for a maximum and the £10,000 for the highest break of the tournament, which could affect his plans to buy a Bentley later this year.

Still, I suppose that 78 grand is better than nothing…

Anyone wandering around Norn Iron, or reading Norn Irish magazines, or watching Norn Irish TV, or with a history of paying attention to the bottles in Norn Irish bars, can’t have failed to notice that this year marks something of an anniversary. Because it’s four hundred years since Bushmills started doing their thing.

Which is quite an achievement. It’s a distillery with more history than, for example, the US of A. It’s been going on longer than the office of Prime Minister has existed. It’s something of an impressive record.

Of course, it’s not that impressive a drink, or at least it’s not my choice. But there’s a general trend noted in the BBC story:

Whiskey still has the reputation of being an old man’s drink that struggles to attract younger customers.

Independent research from Mintel says whiskey and whisky sales have fallen steadily over the last five years. Overall sales have fallen 16% by volume in the five years to 2006.

And sales have declined notably among drinkers aged over 45 – its core base.

It’s something that you notice in bars; where you used to have an awful lot of older men drinking a whiskey and a half of stout, you now get born ten years later drinking lager for a while, then switching to vodka. Which is fine, but it’s not for me.

No, for me it’s still the whiskey. And I am but one man, but I’ll be doing what little I can to counter that 16% drop…

Obviously, not just now, it’s a little early in the day. But I’ll get right on it…

I was away from Belfast, and television, and t’internet for a couple of days. And what happens?

Nothing much, by the sound of it. Belfast seems to be largely ticking over as normal; fuel seems to be flowing despite what must be the best paid picket line in Christendom; the beautiful red cars did rather well and United done fucked up.

Which, frankly, is no good. I need something to get worked up about; something that I can blast a quick rant off about to cover for the fact that I’ve nothing particularly annoying me at the moment. And yet nothing on that there interwab vexed me too much.

Generally, at this point I’d issue a “Thank you” to Mr C Scribe, formerly of Greyabbey, who thoughtfully sent me this link.

Oakgrove College Derry, a secondary school in the north of Ireland has fingerprinted most of its pupils to “help speed up school meals”. Parental consent was not sought before this mass fingerprint piracy was launched. This sneak attack on civil liberties should be opposed by every parent who cares for the personal data of their children.

But I cannot issue said thanks, because this is rather more annoying than I was hoping for. All the arguments against general fingerprinting of the population (which I’ve gone on about more than a little) hold, plus the additional insidious nature of teaching kids that fingerprinting is acceptable for obtaining state services.

In short:

• What the fuck do the school think they’re playing at by bringing this in?
• What the fuck do the majority of the parents think is happening?
• How long do you give the half baked fuckup when people realise the scheme is what it is?

Find out if Obama Is Yo Mama at LiquidGeneration.com!

Hooray for that… I’m no fan of Obama, so I wouldn’t want t’internet to decide that I’m too similar to him…

I don’t think that the five people who read this blog regularly would be surprised to learn that I generally listen to Chris Moyles of a morning. And I have no problems with this; while Moyles has his annoying tendencies (not least of which is his shameless parroting of the “BBC is fuken marvellous and thusly worth paying a tax for” lie), the banter that his team produces is enough to make up for it.

Unfortunately, a few weeks ago, Moyles and the team went on holiday. And the utterly dreadful Mills took his place.

This highly undesirable state of affairs could have had several outcomes:

• I could listen to the Mills moron in the morning, and my blood pressure would suffer. As would my generally positive mental attitude, and to be honest then I would be approximately 197% more likely to drive my car into the Lagan just to make the pain stop. In short, this option was not an option.
• I could listen to my own music in the morning. But this wouldn’t work for me; I like listening to something totally mindless. And if I was to listen to my own MP3s during the morning car park/commute, then I’d end up associating the badness of commuting with the music. And that would be a shame.
• I could listen to some of Belfast’s wonderfully shite commercial radio stations. This option is not going to happen until they stop being parodies of cheesy local radio DJs though. Dear fuck, they’re annoying.
• I could listen to another of the BBC offerings. And that is how I ended up listening to a geriatric Irish fool…

Worryingly enough, I’ve found myself listening to the Wogan show the odd time since Moyles came back.

Which means that, by continuing with their stupidity in swapping Mills in for Moyles, Radio 1′s management are steadily driving me away from them. Geniuses, the lot of them…

Of course, there’s also the minor point that I’m still being kept within the BBC’s stable. But then that’s always going to be the case in radio, because the BBC very generously (with our money) pay for the best radio talent out there. Which again raises the question: could they not find someone better than Mills?

Ages ago, it was decided that a new verb should be added to the dictionary, in honour of the esteemed Professor Emeritus of the Northern Ireland bloggaratti. Yes, to StrayToaster became acceptable language.

And now, it would appear that I’m getting the same ‘honour’, as the following was to be found in an email sent to me:

Oh, for the love of god. Will you stop being so bloomin’ Ed about it.

Apparently, given context and follow-up, the adjective Ed means ‘excessively self deprecating to the point of being thick’.

Well, it’s better than nothing, I suppose…

‘Little’ military actions like the bombing of the unspecified site in Syria by the Israelis in September of 2007 intrigue me; there’s a lot of supposition going on, but very little in the way of fact, or even claims, put out by either side.

Back then, in the most intellectual discussion forum I participate in (the door job), the following points were noted:

1. The Israelis said very little at the time, despite their track record at talking the talk.
2. Syria initially responded with quite nasty words, but then abruptly shut up.
3. The US, Russia, Germany, Iran, all of them were fairly quiet about the whole thing.
4. The international media noted that something had happened, but didn’t even begin to speculate on it.

Following careful consideration of the above points, and the little that was being reported, we arrived at the following possible scenarios:

1. The Syrians had shot down an Israeli jet carrying ‘special’ weapons, and the Israeli’s had tried, unsuccessfully, to bomb the wreckage to prevent said special weapons falling into Syrian hands. We deemed this unlikely, because Syria would have responded in a more managed style. Or so we thought.
2. The Israelis had done something similar to Operation Babylon and hit something that the Syrian’s were developing that they really shouldn’t have been. We didn’t think that this was too likely either, what with the way that Israel had crowed over the Iraq raid, compared to the semi-silence following this one.
3. The Israeli Air Force was basically just saying to Syria “Yup, in asymmetric warfare our Army needs a bit of improvement, but we can still pummel you back to the stone age if you so much as blink. K thx bye.” We didn’t think that this was too likely, what with that statement being public knowledge anyway…

In the end, we decided that it was all just a little too fucked up for our understanding, but that that was about par for the course as far as the Middle East goes.

Seems that we should have focussed more on that there second scenario. Because now the US is claiming to have photo evidence that the Syrians were developing nuclear nastiness. And that the Israelis decided that they didn’t particularly like that development, and made their objections in only the was a modern fighter-bomber can…

So, we were wrong. Well, not entirely, it still is fucked up. But we considered and dismissed the scenario that seems to be what actually happened.

Are we dumb, or what?

If you were to listen to our delightful Education Minister, you’d be surprised that someone so fucking daft ever reached any level of power.

In her recent ‘rebuke’, the text of which I haven’t found but which very interesting listening, she was to be heard going on about how staying the same wasn’t an option, change was happening, she was directly elected to bring about change, that opponents could huff and puff all they wanted but it wouldn’t change anything. Etc etc etc.

Put simply: “I want change for the sake of change, I’m not going to explain why, and you can all go fuck yourselves.” Which sounds nice, and all, but that which sounds good on the soapbox and in opposition is not what good governance needs, is it?

Especially when your precious change is being rolled out with nary a thought about what to change to. Seriously, changing from is pointless without having something new to change to.

And since the politicians aren’t coming up with any ideas, schools are doing it themselves. And well done them; instead of letting themselves be ruined by meddling politicians who, frankly, are ten a penny, they’re trying to set things up so that they can continue in the fashion which consistently out performs the other nations within the UK.

Will they make mistakes? Yes. Just as the politicians do.

Will they learn from them? Probably. Just the opposite of what the politicians do.

Is it the best possible outcome? No. It just beats all the other options being mooted, especially the lack of options being put forth by the Education Minister.

UPDATE: Oh sweet jaysus, have a gander here, 3:20 in. ‘The most radical, progressive overhaul of the education system’. Which is a fancy way of saying what, do you think?

A tiny hole on a runway stops all those silly fixed wing aircraft landing at Edinburgh airport.

On the other hand, in rotary aircraft. Prince William can land a massive aircraft on his girlfriend’s lawn.

See, if it had been a nice whirley bird on final approach to a runway with a random hole in it, it’d just skit over it and hover somewhere nice and smooth. Or someone not so smooth, because they’re just that cool. Basically, the whirely birds are just better…

Plus, nobody is going to let me just fly about on my own for an hour and twelve minutes on a Wednesday afternoon in a fixed wing aircraft, are they?

So, hands up all those who thought that, following the massive HMRC data loss, there would be any change.

Nobody? Why am I not shocked…

Apparently, there are even more data losses than ever.

Information Commissioner Richard Thomas is again telling UK companies to sort out their data protection systems as the number of reported losses of private information keeps on growing.

Since Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs lost a copy of the entire child benefit database six months ago the regulator has been told about almost 100 data breaches by government organisations and private companies.

Obviously, a lot of that is going to be people telling the IC whereas they would have kept quiet about it last year, but still, that is a lot of information getting into the hands of people that shouldn’t have it¹.

And once again, it’s Reason the Very-Manyth why we shouldn’t let there be any central ID database… Because you might as well just rename it ‘One Stop Shop for ID Theft…’

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¹ – To whit, the government…

Rarely has a simple badly animated GIF image summed up the outcome of a meeting so succinctly…

Plz to excuse me, I’m off to headbutt a wall. Hard…

I read this with very little surprise.

The Toome bypass in County Antrim, which opened four years ago, needs a new surface, the Department for Regional Development has announced.

Mainly because the bypass, while a vast improvement over the previous arrangements, is a masterful example of built in obsolescence. By limiting it in the ways that it was limited, with no real savings made by doing so, the road will need major work in the coming decades.

How is it limited? Well, by putting three roundabouts in a couple of miles; putting a random junction in the middle as well. So a road that was meant to speed up traffic flow around Toome ends up having three points of entry into the town, which cause the only congestion on the route. For the love of God, why? Why not just have the one roundabout (by the park and ride), and then have it straight on past the Elk? Bypassing Toome, as was the stated intent?

Not that the roundabouts are a particular bugbear of mine, no sirree….

Tom Clancy has written many books, and in some of them there have been a few big things that foreshadowed future events; probably best known for the following: he has worried about massive middle eastern terrorist attacks on the mainland US and he predicted the use of jetliners as weapons.

And in The Bear and the Dragon, he put forward, as a sort of aside, that the Chinese government (and by extension, its people) can’t tell the difference between the actions of private citizens and the actions of their government.

The specific instance was to do with boycotts: American citizens and companies were avoiding doing business with China and companies that did business in China. The Chinese saw these as being orchestrated by the US government because they couldn’t comprehend that citizens would do such things themselves.

Funnily enough, something vaguely similar is going on in China now.

Hundreds of people demonstrated in cities including Beijing, Wuhan, Hefei, Kunming, and Qingdao – often outside stores of the French chain Carrefour.

Passions ran high, but the protests were closely patrolled by police.

Protesters say they are angry at the scale of protests that accompanied the Olympic torch relay in Paris.
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In Beijing, protests were reported at a Carrefour, and outside the French embassy and a French school, though police were said to have dispersed the crowds rapidly.

So, because of the actions of private citizens in France, Chinese citizens are protesting against French companies and state agencies. Now, is that because the Chinese don’t see the difference, or because they don’t care and are protesting against anything with a French flag?

Either would fit into the mould of the Clancy prediction, I think…

Obviously, when I say ‘plan’, I mean ‘half baked idea that just might work’, but Hannibal never said that in no A-Team episode, so it would look silly as a post title…

But said half baked idea seemed to work. I couldn’t be arsed thinking up any interesting content on Saturday, and said so. Which not only got me a comment (increasingly rare in these days of Google Reader, and I know I’m as guilty as anyone), it also got me posted about elsewhere.

Which was nice.

For reference, CyberScribe, it should be noted that any photos of Strangford that I post will likely look something more like this:

Plz to spot where in that sequence the instructor took the controls…

Or “I does as I’m told, Part II”

Oh dear. There are many, many ways to piss me off. You could say something incredibly stupid (“Oh, ID cards are a great idea”, for instance), or you could say something mean (“Higher taxes for x group are the way forward, because they deserve it for being y.”). Or you could try fucking with something I like. Like this Times dude.

I’ll tell you what’s holding us back from finally getting rid of the fried English breakfast for ever: lack of education. You never see a person with a degree eating a fry-up, do you? Certainly not someone with a 2:1 or better in a humanities subject from a university founded before the invention of the iPod. That’s because they are smart enough to know better.

I have little love for the Full English breakfast, for the obvious reason: the Ulster Fry is immeasurably better than it. But for the sake of solidarity, I’ll say that they’re similar. And thusly this attack on the English fry is an attack on all fries. And that’s just not fucking on.

Now, to qualify my issue with the above quote: I don’t have a humanities 2:1 degree from a long established university. I do have a BSc(Hons) from one of the best universities in the country, but that doesn’t match his criteria. So I’m educated by my standards, but not by the standards of Giles Coren.

And lack of education has nothing to do with the continued survival of the fry, in the same way that lack of education has nothing to do with people continuing to smoke, or drink, or drive, or ski, or leave the house without a stab vest. We know that there are risks, we know that certain activities shorten our life span. But we still do them. It’s the difference between living and staying alive.

You’ll often find that the smartest people in the world do some of the silliest things. Be it exploring, or doing strange experiments, or eating tasty food. And I can’t say that I think that’s a bad thing.

Mr Coren is mistaking education and nannying. With the first, we can make our own choices with full awareness of the consequences. With the second, someone else makes our choices with no more awareness than we have.

Can you guess which one I’d prefer?

You may have noticed that yesterdays post was something of a lame effort. I blame the fact that I was out on Thursday night and slept in a little on Friday, but that’s not important right now…

I was appropriately chastised for this lack of effort. And then again, this afternoon I was chastised for not having something new, fresh and interesting¹ content up. But sure, it’s Saturday; I can’t be expected to be bright and funny too early in the morning. Anyway, this morning I was busy with my whirley-bird obsession this morning; apparently posting from 50 foot over Strangford Lough would be considered somewhat reckless…

Anyway, as I say, I was chastised. But then, why? What kind of content is appropriate to respond with?

• A silly quiz, such as has been the stable of this place for a very long time?
• A semi-thought out post, not with much in the way of links, that nearly nobody will read and fewer people will comment on?
• A proper, full blown rant with nothing like thought getting in the way of some decent swearing?
• A little link to someone else’s blog, with the three simple letters afterwards: heh?
• A moany list of a post, because I can’t be arsed writing anything?

Decisions decisions. So, what should I go for?

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¹ – Quiet down at the back, I can hear you sniggering from here…

Your Slanguage Profile

British Slang: 75% Canadian Slang: 50% Victorian Slang: 50% Aussie Slang: 25% New England Slang: 0% Prison Slang: 0%

It’s good to know that I got over my time in prison so completely…

You know, I don’t specifically go looking for government acts to annoy me. I don’t dig deep, searching for titbits. If you analysed the links on this blog, you’d probably find that the vast majority of links go to either the BBC or The Register; most of the stories that really annoy me have been front page at one or the other of them.

And so it is with the latest brainfart from the Home office.

UK Home Secretary Jacqui Smith is to announce 300 new police-service posts specifically targeted at preventing terrorist radicalisation in Britain.

The BBC reports today that Ms Smith will announce the new jobs later today in a speech to police officers. The extra staff will be a mixture of plods and civilian support personnel.

Smith is expected to say: “We recognise that we can neither arrest our way out of the problems we face nor protect ourselves to the point where the threat disappears.

This threat (which is apparently ‘worse than ever’, ‘a constant companion’, ‘a must see among terrorist threats’, ‘if you only see one continuing bogey man this year, see the UK terrorist threat’) is being talked about rather a lot. And yet, it’s come down to someone driving a burning car at a heavy door and someone else trying to redefine explosive chemistry in a plane. That is to say, this threat has come to precisely fuck all since the July bombings.

Which suggests to me one of two things:

1. That the security forces have been on top of any serious threats; or
2. That the threat has been over stated.

Personally, I say 25% of one, 50% of the other, and 25% blind luck.

So what benefit is to be offered by a further 300 people on the case? Apart, of course, from trying to sound tough on the causes of terrorism. And whadda ya know, it’s election time… What are the chances of electioneering slogans being rolled out during election time?

Listening to such silly statements, knowing that such silly statements are expected to get people voting for the ruling party, and knowing that it’ll likely work, is very tiring. And enough to make you despair about a great many things.

Just realised there now, today marks one year since I started my current employment.

About time I figured out what was going on, don’t you think?