The short arm of the law

So, it's not just those nasty immigrants and loony lefties that the Daily Mail readership have a problem with. They're also not too fond of short people.

Despite the fact that this officer has made a promising start to his police career, has made several arrests in his first month on the job and has a glowing recommendation from his superior officer, the typing chimps over in Daily Mail world still rattle out with the usual hate filled crap:

The police are a joke. I was sat in a Wetherspoons pub this time last year, when two policemen entered the premises. One was about 5'4'' to the top of his helmet, the other 6'4''. The instant they entered, the pub, to a man erupted in laughter. And we are supposed to take our police seriously.

- Maldwyn, Carmarthen, 14/1/2010 16:04

"Sweep their legs out" ?? who is he.. Hong Kong Phooey???

I guess he could be useful to help people stuck in small places- like down the back of the sofa and other such dangerous places...

- Myles Johnson, London, 14/1/2010 14:20

What a joke, he must have turn ups in his underpants.

- Br3ian, Leicester, 14/1/2010 14:03

You get the idea. Comment of the story goes to Keith from Mallorca, whose comment was so fantastic he had to post it twice:

MINI ME

- keith, mallorca, 14/1/2010 12:49

Shame for him!

I was moderated!

The Daily Mail is shit. This is a well-established fact. But the huge steaming pile of shite spouted by Richard Littlejohn this week (the national press equivilent of a ned vomiting on the street after a binge drinking session), compelled me to do the hitherto unthinkable and leave a comment on the Daily Mail website!

Sadly, the 'good' people at the Daily Mail saw fit not to publish my comment. Probably just as well. No doubt, I would have been shouted down as a "labour apologist"* (a popular phrase over in DM land at the moment) and someone who doesn't appreciate political satire. For the record, I do. The shit stain that Littlejohn left in this week's Mail (OK, so that's like finding a bit of stray turd in a toilet, so I shouldn't really be surprised) is nowhere near satire. Satire is generally something that is well researched, makes a valid point and pokes fun at something genuinely absurd. What Littlejohn does is just make shit up to make his dumb, ill-informed readers throw their hands in the air and yell "the country is going to hell in a hand cart!!" And don't the trained monkeys respond so well? Such clever dears. Even Pavlov had to ring that bell a fair few times before his dogs learned that it meant 'dinner time, lets drool'.

So, if the moderators at the Daily Mail website won't allow me the right to reply there, I guess I'll just have to do it here:

What kind of research is done to arrive at any of these ‘facts’? A 5 year old could do a quick Google search and come up with a more accurate tirade than this. You imply that the Attorney General of the US is elected. They aren’t. The AG is appointed by the President. You imply that Gordon Brown wasn’t elected. He was. He was voted in as an MP, and upon Tony Blairs resignation was voted in as Leader of the Labour Party, ergo, Prime Minister. That’s how it works in a Parliamentary Democracy. You imply that GB released al Megrahi. He didn’t. It was a matter for the devolved Scottish Government.

You want to talk injustice, Richard? How about a ‘journalist’ getting paid the guts of a cool million a year, to sit in a Florida mansion and make rubbish up to titillate the less informed members of Britain’s right wing, then have it printed in a national newspaper, while ordinary people are struggling to keep the mortgage paid! That’s far bigger scandal than any political outrage.

*I'm not a Labour apologist, nor would I consider myself a supporter of the Labour party.

Giraffe-funk

Featuring two of my favourite animals ... ducks and giraffes!

Zoo madness!

Here's a story from the Bristol Evening Post (supposedly):

Outside Bristol Zoo is the car park, with spaces for 150 cars and 8 coaches. It has been manned 6 days a week for 23 years by the same charming and very polite car park attendant with the ticket machine. The charges are £1. per car and £5. per coach.

On Monday 1 June, he did not turn up for work. Bristol Zoo management phoned Bristol City Council to ask them to send a replacement parking attendant.

The Council said "That car park is your responsibility." The Zoo said "The attendant was employed by the City Council... wasn't he?" The Council said "What attendant?"

Gone missing from his home is a man who has been taking daily the car park fees amounting to about £400 per day for the last 23 years!

Total sum just short of £2.9 million!

Not sure if it's true or not, but I'm looking at various car parks around the Glasgow area to see if I can pull a similar scam.

Kingston Quay, Wallace Street, Glasgow

Here's a link for a little video on Kingston Quay, Wallace Street, Glasgow. Enjoy :)

Random Thought #1

If people stand in line at Starbucks for half an hour, get to the counter and still haven't decided what they want to order; I should be allowed to kill them.

Big Brother is googling you ...

There has been some degree of outcry over Google Map's new Street View function. Why?

The conspiracy theorists are hard at work, trying to convince us all that Big Brother has won another battle in the fight for personal freedom and liberty. Next up it will be identity cards. Pretty soon after, we'll all be walking around with microchips in our frontal cortexes with a permanent Wi-Fi link to a Government super computer, monitoring our every thought. The Party keeps the masses in check with propoganda from Minitrue, weeding out dissenters through the powers of the Thought Police and Room 101, society as we know it ceases to exist ... it's George Orwell's wet dream and it's coming through a computer screen near you.

Thankfully, though, there is an alternative to all this traceability and that's not to give a damn. People use social networking sites to reveal personal, albeit mundane, information about themselves, posting images of their latest booze-fueled vomit fest and having conversations of an all-too-intimate nature on public forums. Believe the conspiracy nuts, and we are but whores of our own demise by allowing what little privacy we have left to be chucked around t'internet.

But what does Google Street View actually show you? Nothing. Well, nothing you can't see for yourself by doing something really out-there, like ... walking down a street. Here we have my living room window:


You'll notice that's my flatmate's scrubs hanging up to dry at the window. Nothing you wouldn't see most days you take a stroll down my street.

Here is my colleague walking into our office:

Again, hardly an extreme invasion of any personal privacy and nothing that can't be seen most mornings at our office. So why all the fuss?

After 5 minutes of playing around with Google Street View, the novelty soon wears off and you realise that it's little more than yet another tool for users of internet land to withdraw from actuality and experience existence as a complex set of algorithms and pixels.

There are those that claim Google Street View to be a useful tool for directions. You know, us menfolk can't be seen to actually stop and ask for directions and so need every tool at our disposal to prevent such an emasculating scenario from ever occuring. However in these days of mobile phones, sat nav, route planner websites and, shudder to think, even good old fashioned maps, that arguement doesn't really pass muster.

Another related development in Big Brother's ever expanding armoury of image surveilance techniques is the PhotoTrackr, a gadget so cutting edge they didn't have time to spell it correctly. An ingenious little widget that hooks on to your camera and records exactly where your pictures were taken - attaching lattitude and longitude data to your digital snaps. Stick them online so that your friends (and MI5) can bring up the exact location on Google Maps. One of those leaps in technology that sounds painfully cool, but a moments thought leads to the inevitable question "Why would anyone actually need this?"

PhotoTrackr and Google Street View are just some of the latest examples of technology that, despite being amazingly cool at face value, are just utterly pointless. So, as long as there aren't any pictures floating around web world of the cannabis farm in your flat or of you driving a lorry full of asylum seekers into the country, chances are that Big Brother, even if he is watching, isn't going to be interested in you anyway.