ResI Ipsa Loquitur

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Not too bad
2008-04-14 20:39:00
The vagaries of language have always interested me, especially the conditioned social responses of casual social encounters. I enjoy watching and listening to people who meet by chance in the street, or in the office, or any place whereby by their passage is obviously beyond this encounter but not in any kind of rush that would disallow a bit of a chinwag. Recently, I saw two people quite literally bump into each other in a work environment and it was obvious from their mild shock and recognition that the hadn?t seen each other in a while. The immediate conversation went:?Oh wow, hi! I haven?t seen you for a while. How the devil are you???Oh you know, not TOO bad. How are things with you?? ?Mustn?t grumble. How?s work?? ?Oh, really busy at the moment, REALLY busy. How about you?  What are you up to?? ?Yep same, BUSY just isn?t the word.? ?Yeah?? ?Oh yeah.? I stopped listening at this point as they obviously were not going to say anything vaguely interesting to each other as t...

Time Specific Acknowledgments of Parting
2008-03-17 12:52:00
One morning last week, I was sitting at my desk, beavering away (building a small dam out of gnawed down pencils) when an obviously vitally important person, spewing forth into a very small mobile phone, nervously rushed to a place in the office guaranteed to allow me maximum aural and visual access to his side of a, slightly louder than it needed to be, conversation.The conversation, as it is now itchily still scratched onto my piqued consciousness, went something like this: ?Yes, yes, you?re right, I AM a very important person?..mmm?.mmm?yes?Can I just interject here for moment to say some words that are vaguely pertinent to what you have all just said. ?Think Synergy?, ?We NEED a Step Change?, ??on our game etc.?, ?Let?s play to win on this one? and whilst I was saying those important things I just want to point out that I was making the appropriate hand actions and affirmative, confident glances used to convey knowledge and control??.let me just stop you there to reaffirm my ...
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Is America doomed through lack of choice?
2008-03-15 17:37:00
Part One: John McCainYou can get anything in America it seems, it is, by all manner of definitions, the land of plenty. A bubbling, spitting, melting pot of every race, creed, sexuality, age and haircut. A shining, phallic beacon of Capitalism and democracy and surprisingly, and in no way significant, the largest population of Germans outside Germany. It is the undisputed Heavyweight champion of the world accounting for at least 50% of the world's military spending. It is the superpower and theoretically, the land of the free.Then why, as a federal constitutional republic with one of the worlds largest populations and budgets, is it still operating under a two party system?What choice do the American people face at the end of this year: John McCain, Ron Paul, Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama.John McCain seems to be obsessed with marketing himself to America as a conservatives conservative, constantly bleating about war, abortion, race and sexuality. Whereas he had historically shown...
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Queen of England to Fight in Iraq
2008-03-02 17:19:00
In a move sure to shock a deeply cynical and sceptical Nation, Elizabeth II, The Queen of England , is to mobilise her long forgotten chariot and lead her troops to battle. Inspired by her mad-fer-action soldier Grandson, Prince Harry, The Queen told reporters that she had been in the the Royal Garage looking for an errant Corgi (later to be found cornering an simpering Equerry) when she pulled back the tarpaulin of a large object in a long forgotten corner. Under the cover was Queen Boudica's original chariot, an important cultural symbol of the enduring spirit of Britain and it's proud military history.It has now been made aware to the press that throughout that night, the original Chariot went through a number of very technical and secret modifications thought to include a number of rocket launchers, an oil slick producer, a number of machine gun emplacements, a Gin and Tonic dispenser and a smokeless ashtray.It is unsure at the present time when the Queen is likely to be deploy...
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"...but is Afghanistan ready for me!"
2008-02-28 22:21:00
Prince Harry's militaristic dress-up fight fetish has reached bizarre new heights today as it emerged that he had hijacked a plane 10 weeks ago and flew to Afghanistan to, "solve this Taleban issue 'third in line to the British crown' style!"On arriving in Afghanistan it has come to light that the soldier Prince commandeered a tank and rag-tag bunch of forgotten soldiers, thought to be doing various menial jobs such as cook, mechanic, helicopter pilot etc., who, it is reported, "get the job done, but aren't necessarily familiar with the rule book." Prince Harry, and his men, thought to be calling themselves 'Arry's Boys', are thought to be at present speeding his tank from cave to cave shouting, "Yeah, you bloody hide Osama, because when I find you I'm going to forget the Queensbury rules ever existed."Staid and stuffy Commanding Officer, Major-General Basil Frightened-Giraffe of the Queens Own Gaylords blustered and fumed when he heard off the Prince's unorthodox methods b...
More About: Ready

A Very British Earthquake
2008-02-27 09:34:00
The biggest earthquake in Britain for nearly 25 years has shaken homes across large parts of Middle England. Whilst people in Newcastle, London and Manchester shrugged off the event with world-weary cogniscensce, smaller middle class communities as far and wide as Norwich, Beaconsfield, Chester and Cheltenham are still reeling fearing that the repercussions, and indeed the pointless remonstrating, could go on for months.A villager in Yorkshire, who chose not to be named, began her clear up today, consisting of closing cupboard doors that had swung open at 0100 and picking up a child's bike that had fallen from the patio onto the the lawn. She angrily, lamented:"What if Sienna was on that bike? Eh? What if she had been on our lawn trampoline and a giant chasm in the ground had opened up? Who is answering these questions? Why are the authorities so silent all of a sudden? Everybody knows that London has giant inbuilt springs to withstand this awesome force but what about us up here,...
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Hunter S. Thompson, an appreciation I suppose...
2008-02-20 19:43:00
Ever since 1993, when a kindly yet deeply warped soul gave me his battered copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to read, I have been enthralled and enlivened by the good doctor's writing, presence, soul and spirit.From the moment I finished the book, barely a day has gone past when I haven't thought about writing. Of creating some gigantic footprint on a cultural world. I have consumed his work in various media since then and have absorbed the belief, the inspiration to be my own writer and follow his and Orwell's fine doctrine to find my own voice.I have had what I believe to be not a unique experience but one that has probably been similar to many. I don't feel moved to buy a t-shirt, get a Gonzo tattoo, add a quote to the bottom of my emails or start shooting typewriters with highly powered firearms. I don't feel inclined to emulate his remarkable and sometimes harrowingly substance dependent life and experience. However, he is a true original, an exceptional and outstan...
More About: Hunter , Thompson , Appreciation , Hunter S Thompson

It's The Sun wot will win it
2008-02-11 21:45:00
Like it or not The Sun is an extremely influential newspaper in the UK. It is the virtual mouthpiece of the Murdoch Empire cajoling the readership into watching Football (on Sky Sports), the Simpsons (On Sky One) and 24 and Lost (also on Sky One). All the time appearing as innocent as a fireside chat with your slightly racist Grandfather.Not that I'm not saying that the Sun is a racist newspaper, far from it, but, just like my old Grandfather it says things that you cringe at but know in it's heart of hearts, it doesn't mean it. Only, unlike my Grandfather, The Sun knows exactly what it's doing. Or not, as the case may (legally) be.The Sun's political Murdoch mouthpiece, Trevor Kavanagh, published this article today, a damning critique of 'New' Labour's fiscal and ideological performance since the take over of Gordon Brown. They obviously don't like him as they are try to portray him as a 'Loony Leftie' and appealing to the readership's inner Thatcher to reject him.And ...

All you need to know about the Sharia Law controversy
2008-02-09 22:31:00
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown writes a tempered, balanced and informative article neither sparing the sword or straying from the factual. Please read this article before you comment anything on this topic. She is rightly outraged yet I felt indignant over the Arch Bishop's comments not because of it's blinkered stupidity but for their diluted, academic, nonsensical simple view of the world and it's arrogant take on how people should think.
More About: Sharia , Controversy , Sharia Law

The Best Trick Shot Ever
2008-02-05 23:23:00
You must watch this. Even when you think it's finished.....
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The World?s Smallest Bodybuilder
2008-02-01 17:09:00
Should war break out with little people, will you be ready?Aditya ?Romeo? Dev, pictured being held aloft by his trainer, said ?I?ve been training as a bodybuilder for the last two years and by now I think I must be the strongest dwarf in the world. I have always been fit but since I started working out I have become famous for my strength.?His name is Romeo. He is a dwarf strong man.The picture is great, isn't it? It reminds me of when Physical Fitness was seen as the national salvation during the times of conscription in the 50's. why is the trainer holding him? He is taking away Romeo's mojo by brandishing him like that, "You may be strong, little man, but I can hold you like a giant novelty popisicle. Do not misbehave, I WILL eat you".
More About: World , The World , Bodybuilder

'Everything I needed to know I learned in McDonald's'
2008-01-24 23:52:00
McDonald's will offer "A-level grade" training courses."McDiplomas" and "McQualifications" are a little too easy but BBC journalist John Hand used to work for "Maccy Dee's" says fast-food restaurant was a grounding for life.Indeed.I suppose it easy to poke fun at the uniforms, the poor working conditions, discouragement of unions, micro-management and crappy food (and I guess that's why I'm going to) but it's a pretty easy way to make money when you're working your way through college or saving for your first car etc. so there's no need to completely disrespect it. What irritates me though is how Part trys to use his time there as kind if rites of passage. I'm sure it was a laugh and all that but come on, it's McDonald's.He mentions that he progressed well through the ranks to get his stars very early and had a great deal of responsibility as he showed aptitude and verve. Why is this surprising? The author is obviously a very bright man! He also manages that he is good c...
More About: Learned

God Fearing Clip Art
2008-01-23 23:30:00
Words cannot explain this collection of clip art.Unbelief?Shacking?Magnificent, just magnificent.More here.
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Cleaners and Cheese
2008-01-22 23:10:00
This is a verbatim conversation I heard between two cleaners. The first cleaner was a young English girl with a slow London accent that sounded like she was considering every word as it left her mouth. The other cleaner was a bored and disinterested Polish girl probably wondering why she was not using her degree in Astrophysics.English Cleaner: "There's a shop in Isleworth that sells nothing but Polish goods you know."Polish Cleaner (very disinterested): "Oh. Really?"EC: "Yeah." There was a VERY LONG PAUSE and then she said, "Devon is the best place in Britain to buy Cheese . There's LOADS of farmland there so it's very pure."PC: "Oh."EC: "I don't like MANY cheeses, but I do like Cheddar, our National cheese, and Philadelphia."PC: "Yes?"EC: "They brought cheeses from around the World to my school once and there's this one cheese that has GREEN bits in it!"PC: "Green?"EC: "YEAH! I refused to eat it. I do like Cheddar though as it is, as I say, our National cheese."PC: "Yes."I...
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I have a dream
2008-01-21 22:32:00
"Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of captivity. But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free.One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize an appalling condition. In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent...
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Sausages Foreward (Excerpt 3 of 3)
2008-01-20 23:10:00
The hate for Tregarrick was very real. This wasn?t a mild dislike or a screwed up nose at the mention of his name. This was extremely anger-fueled parishioners with burning torches stamping up to the parochial house with all the pomp and circumstance of a Frankenstein movie. He once received a body of resentment so great that they informed the Bishop via a personal lobby group that walked from their parish to the Bishop?s mansion. It was 75 miles away. They could no longer guarantee Tregarrick?s safety or the sanctity of the church grounds as a place of peace unless he was removed that very day. His short notice replacement was an eighty year old priest barely clinging on to his faculties. He was treated as a saint even though he was deaf and powerfully and uncontrollably flatulent. Tregarrick had done nothing intentional to these people, there was no malice in him, no evil sense of fun or a wicked mischievousness. He sometimes mused that he was blighted by a curse but could ...
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Sausages Foreward (Excerpt 2 of 3)
2008-01-19 19:37:00
Tregarrick felt weak, he felt in no state to try and formulate an explanation for the previous five minutes and certainly not the previous five weeks. In the events that had led to this particular summoning, he had a lot to explain. He had set in motion a sequence of events, to which he was a direct or indirect party, which had led to a number of unfortunate outcomes including a prolonged hospitalisation, a number of arrests, a church gutted by fire, several lost pets and regional campaign against organised religion. This was not an isolated incident with Father Tregarrick. Summoning up all his energy, and attempting to block out his hygienic molestation, he decided that he needed to get his account across in a dignified and repentant fashion. He had one last chance to restore the Bishop's faith in him. He decided he would explain that what had happened was merely the result of consequence, bad luck and the work of evil people outside of his control or cognition. Exactly as i...
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Sausages Foreward (Excerpt 1 of 3)
2008-01-18 19:30:00
The ancient floorboards creaked as Father Tregarrick walked familiarly towards the sweeping staircase that led to the Bishop Marney's private office. He stopped and looked down almost disappointedly at the floorboards. He sighed and crept on his way, trying all the while to remain as silent as possible. He reached the door, knocked it apologetically and waited for acknowledgment from within.He looked down at his feet again and absent-mindedly shifted his weight from foot to foot making the floor groan intermittently under the changing pressure. The sounds emitted make the boards sound like they were wheezing like an old man. A sound of shuffled papers suggested movement from inside the room which followed by an inaudible bellowed instruction. Father Tregarrick was confused so he knocked the door again to gain clarity. Unbeknownst to him, Tregarrick was still shifting from foot to foot when Bishop Marney swung the door open violently and spoke with a clipped menace."I said, wait ...
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Free at last?
2008-01-17 15:00:00
For the past four and a half centuries land on Sark, a small island 14 miles north west of Jersey and some 20 miles from France, was passed to eldest sons for centuries (known in law as Male Primogeniture). This made it effectively the last feudal constitution in the western world. However, to comply with United Nations human rights legislation, it has been toying with democratic elections to for the first time on it's history. Despite radical changes to the constitution and administration Sark has no airport, no cars and only (well maintained) dirt roads. Transport is limited to foot or bicycle and the although the signs of modern life are numerous they are prevalent.The French abandoned Sark in the 1550s and 40 English families were chose to colonise it, their descendants have ruled it ever since under a system dating back to Queen Elizabeth I, who granted the ruling "Seigner" a fief, a lower form of kingdom, on the tiny Channel Island. Sark since then has had a prou...
More About: Politics , Free , Free At Last

The Emperor?s New Air
2008-01-16 22:22:00
Have Apple finally started to get it wrong? They announced the MacBook air yesterday and now all the hoopla has died down, it doesn't actually seem that good. If you really look at it very hard, ignoring the initial thought of 'ooh, it's thin and shiny and I want to lick it as I'm pretty sure it's made of chocolate', the best thing one can say about it is it's small and can fit into your designer leather bag. Tech nically Speaking, it's at a distinct disadvantage in terms of both cost and power. It features a 1.8-inch hard disk drive with 80GB of storage capacity standard. A 64GB solid-state disk (SSD) drive is an also an option which is quite a nice touch. The hard drive is a Parallel ATA (PATA) model that skims along at 4200 RPM. But, 1 USB port? No user-changeable battery? The Lenovo Thinkpad x series is cheaper, lighter and has more stuff than this thing does. The Airbook seems to be a pure boutique device, specifically for writing your destined-to-be-unpublished nov...
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The Best Productivity Hacks Ever
2008-01-15 23:39:00
Over the past year or so I have been reading about lifehacks and productivity tips.  There are some fantastic sites out there that really come up with the goods when it comes to changing our life through small little changes. Specifically, I have been looking at sites such as zenhabits, lifehacker and web worker daily and I've used their tips quite a lot.  The only problem is that there are so many of them that to try and correlate all these tips into a coherent whole makes it impossible to actually get anything done because you are constantly achieving such incredible efficiency that your only tasks that remain are that which pertain to making more productivity tweaks.  Therefore, for your pleasure I have distilled all these little tips and I present you my guide to Productivity Tips and Lifehacks so that you are able get everything done and still have time to rub your chin in a tremendously, self satisfied way. 1. Do Things. The key aspect to all 'getting thin...
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What the Government Says
2008-01-14 22:47:00
The British Government has a news feed, that I subscribe to, called 'The Government Says'.  It's very Orwellian in a way but it doesn't give the wide-ranging and terrifying pronouncements the leader did, it all comes across as quite sweet and parochial. Therefore, obviously, most of the stuff that comes out of it is awful dross about extending the M99 57 inches to make the 4th longest road in Rutland or that the Government is thinking about wearing a blue tie next week and wondering if it was OK to urinate into a pewter jug over a huddled orphan.  You know, normal type of administrational things. What's funny are the petitions, suggestions and complaints that people send in via various means (email, letters, Morse code, pigeon, scratched onto their arm with the pin off an "I'm 37" badge - I believe they're obliged to consider all communication channels by Royal Decree). "We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to give Gary Lineker a Knightho...
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Plane Anarchy
2008-01-13 21:14:00
I went to Australia last year, it's a wondrous place. Very hot, very beautiful, very welcoming and not at all what I was expecting. I wasn't really anticipating people being unfriendly, but I wasn't preparing for the outstanding and sometimes unerring friendliness pretty much where everywhere I went. It was incredible really, I remember thinking that it wasn't that people were surveying me with, "I know, I'll be friendly, this sunburned man will like me then", they weren't thinking anything at all, it was all completely natural. It was as if it was completely illogical and downright odd not to be friendly and welcoming, like not being like that would be more effort and less fun. I experienced this feeling everywhere and at first it really knocked me sideways. For example, I was in a restaurant and the waitress dished out excellent service on a "peer to peer" basis rather than a "server to recipient" way. All the choices were aided by her and the dispensed service excellent b...
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I Want To Be Someone Else For A Living
2008-01-12 20:12:00
I've never reviewed a TV show before. Today, however I am sitting here having the dubious pleasure of watching 'The One and Only' on UK's BBC1 and I feel compelled to write something about it. This compulsion comes from hoping you never have the misfortune of straying on to the program at some point in your life and therefore burning upon your very soul the revulsion you may feel towards all sorts of music forever thereafter. OK, it's not that bad but it is awful TV. First throw into the mix 12 desperate tribute singers that I'm sure are all fine and lovely people but the reason they didn't make it as singers is because they are poor singers. And the reason they didn't make it as impersonators is because they are bad impersonators. Next in this heady cocktail of proletariat mediocrity is an audience of families and friends so full of love and expectation of fame and fortune that they would clap and whistle their loved one defecating onto a piece of fruit, as if witnessin...
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Who is Calling?
2008-01-11 13:50:00
It seems that Art sometimes imitates life. The FBI has recently been cut off due to non-payment ofphone bills. The owed $66,000 and had failed a numbero ftimes and was halted due to untimely payment.Hilarious.Perhaps it was desperate FBI agents, failed by their administration, typing 'Who is Calling ' as I alluding to yesterday?Maybe the worm is turning and the employees, rather than their patsy boards, are taking action on the unconstitutional, illegal and immoral wiretaps when the administration of Bush's government forgets to put their hands in their pockets. Lets hope the mistakes become more frequent, more often and more f**cking stupid so that when Bush goes, if he isn't impeached for war crimes and illegally waging war, he will remembered as a laughable mistake that the great American people will shrug off and embrace the world again with a guilty, yet reconciliative, grin.
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