Archive for October, 2005

Some excellent ariel photos

October 31st, 2005

I’m testing Flock at the moment, in fact I’m writing this on the linux version to see if the built in blog posting module is useful.  So far, so good.  One of the abilities is for your favourites to be stored by del.icio.us.  Useful service, I found this excellent page of ariel photos on my first visit.  This image is the White horse of Uffington, not too far from me here in Newbury.


Not great with images. I had to scale it using HTML. Still, it’s a good start.

Britishness Test

October 31st, 2005

Looks like I’ll have to swot up a bit more if I want a British passport – 11 right out of 15.

BBC NEWS | Magazine | Can you pass a citizenship test?

Stupid Facts.

October 30th, 2005

Normally, when I come out with stuff like this, the missus yawns and shouts “boring but true”.

Look at PJ O’Rourke – he made a good few quid out of the boring but true.

P45.net – Useless Facts

The British Museum prompted the invention of the Rawlplug. It needed electrical fittings installed in the walls without damaging the masonry but traditional methods weren’t good enough. Local builder John Rawlings solved the problem by inventing a fibre plug, made from jute and bonded with animal blood. He called it the Rawlplug…

About 70,000 people a year require hospital treatment in Britain from injuries sustained while trying to open “stubborn” packaging. The most dangerous packaging is glass bottles, responsible for 26% of packaging related visits.

Melanie Phillips – idiot or just asleep on the job?

October 27th, 2005

It’s bad enough having to listen to Melanie Phillips having her logic beaten down each week on “The Moral Maze”, but to have articles like this sent to you in email….lets just say you wonder what sort of qualifications your need to be a ‘social commentator’? No TV? Inability to buy a newspaper? Lack of internet access? The woman excels herself this time by managing to avoid seeing, reading or listening to the news.

To quote the media-dodging Melanie

The appearance of a muted handful of opinion pieces today about the rioting in Birmingham last weekend merely serves to highlight the fact — as Alice Miles in the Times actually says —that so few people have said anything about it at all. Indeed, there has been a striking near-silence about these events. What happened was that a rumour spread by pirate radio stations went round the Afro-Caribbean community in the run-down Lozells road area of the city that a 14 year-old black girl had been gang-raped by between three and 25 Pakistani men. Reports of what happened next are confusing and inadequate, but in the disturbances that followed a black Christian was set upon by up to 11 armed youths and stabbed to death as he walked home from the cinema, a mixed-race man was shot dead and an Asian taxi-driver was attacked.

So, “muted handful of opinion pieces today”. Lets see. Google news is only carrying 111 articles about this unreported news – days after the event. I saw a lot more when it was ‘fresh’ news. Obviously Melanie was passed out at that point. Shame Melanie was trying so hard to make her racist point that she didn’t even begin to perform the basic research required to make her anti-everybody-not-white-Christian-and-British story stand up

By any standards such occurrences are deeply disturbing. If this had been white on black violence, there would have been a media feeding frenzy and the newspapers would have been full of reconstructions, analysis and instant opinions and recriminations. Instead, there has been near silence. The reason is obvious. The cult of multiculturalism holds that all minorities are victims of the majority, and therefore minorities must always be blameless. When two minorities start beating each other up, therefore, politically correct Britain is paralysed.

Aha, a good old, right-wing PC bashing. Now we reach the point. After ignoring the evidence in front of everyones’s eyes and ears, Mels finally gets around to the point she normally gets back to. The one point she has.

Melanie – buy a paper, turn on the telly or the radio, but please, please, engage with the world before you pontificate to us on things you know nothing about (and proudly show that fact to the world.)

Still, it gets her exposure on places like littlegreenfootballs, the renowned anti-muslim hate site. Funny that, they go well together.

Comment Spam

October 25th, 2005

Here’s a pointer for the clue challenged. If the first 290 comment spams don’t get through, you may as well go somewhere else. Here’s an image – no google-juice for these losers. TIP: The 290 and 296 are the number of attempts this idiot made to force a comment onto this lowly blog. (I really hate that word – it’s so like ‘cyber’ was a few years ago)

blogspam.jpg

It’s the sheer waste of time, effort, bandwidth, CPU cycles and memory that gets on my goat. You would think that these idiots actually make an attempt at monitoring their ‘work’, but no. They continue to bang their heads against this particular brick wall time and time again, getting nowhere. How can any company think that this is a good idea?

Update 30/10/05: We’re now at 394 attempts, all failed, yet this idiot still keeps trying. I’m almost tempted to run the fool down

Bad Behavior has blocked 442 access attempts in the last 7 days.

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