They found her 'Head and Shoulders' on the beach

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Mick Hume - Is that the fin of a fearmonger?

Whether the fin thing spotted off Cornwall belongs to a killer shark, a basking surfer, a dunkin’ dolphin or a “porbeagle”...one thing is clear. It marks the summer’s first sighting of a Great White Metaphor for an all-at-sea society...

Then again, maybe it’s not a metaphor at all. I seem to recall that Ernest Hemingway once told those searching for hidden meanings in The Old Man and the Sea that the old man represented an old man, the sea was the sea, and the sharks were just sharks.


PO faced

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Postmasters who speak out about closures face losing £60,000 pay-offs

Post Office bosses turned to blackmail and spying to make sub-postmasters co-operate with their closure programme. Postmasters were told exactly how to answer questions from worried customers - and warned that undercover PO staff would check that they complied.

They were also told they could lose compensation payments of up to £60,000 if they failed to parrot the official line. Tories reacted with outrage, saying postmasters were being forced to act as Government spin-doctors.

I'm not sentimental about sub-post offices and village shops. I've lived in villages and seen the reality of 'local shops for local people' and wasn't impressed. Many sub-POs are largely used as payment stations for pensioners and people on benefits. The 'postal' aspect has all but disappeared. I'm sure there are small communities where the post office is an important asset and where that is the case I'm equally sure the local PO will survive. I lived in a prosperous village in Hertfordshire many years ago. looking at old photos of the high street I could see that things had looked very different 50 years earlier. There were three bakers, two ironmongers, an undertaker with a joinery next door (coffin making a speciality), two butchers, 4 pubs, a greengrocer, 2 general stores, a flour miller, a post office, a garage with two petrol pumps, a farrier/blacksmith, a village school, a police house and so on...

Things change, not always for the best. But there are still thriving villages around - Wye, in Kent, is a lovely example. Trouble is, houses there cost a small fortune. I'm sure they've got a post office but it's probably not particularly busy on benefit payout day is it? Oh, the irony.





Full House

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We've got a house full of teenagers for the next two weeks. My son's friends have flown up from Kent to enjoy the delights of Aberdeen. My internet connection is taking a hammering with three X-Box lives, four laptops and two desktops active most of the time.

These lads eat like horses. Full cooked breakfasts every morning and huge meals in the evening. Last night I was busy making thirty portions of chicken curry and bolognese sauce. We had fish and chips this evening - thirty bloody quid!  Jeez, when I was a kid in south London we used to pay one shilling (5 pence) for a child's portion of cod and chips served on a plate and eaten in the restaurant section. Eeee, those were great days...well, apart from the polio, the poverty and the pederasts.

I'm off, before this turns into the Four Yorkshiremen sketch.




ID Theft

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Robert X. Cringely®  Dumb, dumber, and Davis
Here's a lesson in how not to do business on the Internet:
  1. Start a company that guarantees your customers never have to worry about having their identity stolen

  2. Publish your own Social Security Number on your company's Web site, to show just how foolproof your service is

  3. Allow a mentally retarded person to steal your identity, using the SSN you've just broadcast to the world

  4. Send thugs to his home to wring a confession from him, making the crime impossible to prosecute

Via J-Walk


Ten Fake Apple Scandals

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9: Troy Wolverton, Neil Cavuto, and the Apple Stock Scandal

This is a great piece, at Roughly Drafted, for Apple lovers. Why does Apple seem to get a bad press when Microsoft is ignored for doing the self same things? It's not just jealousy:

It's The Apple Manipulators.
Apple is getting so much bad press compared to Microsoft because it is growing. Microsoft's stock is flat despite impressive revenue growth and profits. After peaking with the dotcom bubble in 1999 at $58 shares, it’s fallen into a $30 slump ever since. In the last ten years, Microsoft's stock is only up 69.8%.

Apple's stock also fell in 2000 with the tech crash, but began ramping up in 2004 and has climbed dramatically since. In those same ten years, Apple's stock has gone up 3440.9%. Microsoft presents little opportunity for stock manipulation. Even faced with the worst news, Microsoft is unlikely to go down, and even with record profits, it didn't go up.

Microsoft is a mature dinosaur; investors see little prospect for the company to dramatically grow into new businesses or to adapt with a changing climate. Apple, on the other hand, is closely watched by investors because it has delivered one major success after another.



I must be getting old

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 I'm a foul-mouthed bugger.  My dear wife was known as Mrs T by her colleagues in Kent (T for Tourettes) and the opening words of her leaving speech were - 'Fuck, bollocks, shit, wank' (it got a big laugh). I've been known to use expletives in my posts and you wouldn't want to see me in the full flow of road-rage. But I find myself getting seriously bored with 'swearybloggers',  who seem unable to manage a sentence without calling someone a fucktard or a cunt-rag, a piece of dog plop or a cock-sucking fucking cunt-rag or a cock-knocker (sic) (No I don't know what a 'cock-knocker' is either).  Or, when they seem to have completely run out of ideas, a 'fucking fuck'.

Now, some people (actually, a lot of people) deserve to be called names and I'm a huge supporter of ad hominem attacks of all kinds but there comes a point when you risk ending up sounding like a gormless 15 year old schoolboy. If that's the intention, well done, you've managed it,  but if the aim is to come across as a mature, sophisticated commentator on British life and politics then I'm afraid, (if you'll pardon the French) you're FUCKED!

Don't give up the day job

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New Study: Top 50k blogs had $500 million in 2006 Revenu

Looks good at first glance but it seems the lion's share of the revenue is earned by the top 15% of blogs.

That leaves the vast majority with distictly unimpressive earnings of less than a dollar a week.

The data behind this study is skimpy but even so I think it's fair to say that for most bloggers advertising is a complete waste of space.

So why do so many insignificant blogs carry ads? I think it's to create the impression that they are more popular/influential than they really are.

They seem to be saying 'Look! I 'earn an income' from advertising so there must be lots and lots of people visiting my site'

All they are really doing is advertising Google (or whichever ad network they are using).

As for income. most will be lucky to earn enough to buy a cup of coffee every month.


So, if you're making piss-poor money from your blog adverts please do us all a favour and dump the bloody things.

Or at least make them unobtrusive (after all, it doesn't really matter where you place them if nobody is going to click on them!)



De Menezes Report

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Commissioner was 'misled' over De Menezes shooting, report finds
Britain's most senior counter-terrorism police officer deliberately misled his own commissioner about the fatal shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, an official report has found.  The report says it has "serious concern" over the conduct of assistant commissioner Andy Hayman, and says complaints against him are upheld...

The IPCC finds that complaints against Mr Hayman, who is still in charge of counter-terrorism, are substantiated, and gives a clear signal it believes he should face disciplinary action. The Metropolitan Police Authority will now decide what action to take.

Complaints against the commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, are not upheld, but the IPCC finds he was not told about a large amount of evidence suggesting the wrong man had been shot, and did not know until the next day.

Mr Hayman told IPCC investigators he could not remember what he told the Crime Reporters Association on the afternoon of July 22 about the shooting. The IPCC report disagrees. "There is compelling corroboration that AC Hayman categorically stated at the CRA briefing that the deceased was not one of the four wanted men," it says. About 30 minutes later Mr Hayman attended a meeting of top Met officers and senior Whitehall officials at Scotland Yard.

The report finds: "It is apparent that he deliberately withheld the information both that he briefed the CRA and on the contents of that briefing despite being asked for information by the commissioner. He therefore misled the commissioner, other senior MPS [Metropolitan Police Service] officers and representatives from the MPA and HO [home office] who were present."



No pork swords here please

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No sex, please, you're a carnivore
A new phenomenon in New Zealand is taking the idea of "you are what you eat" to the extreme. "Vegansexuals" is the name given to people who not only don't eat any meat or animal products, but also choose not to be sexually intimate with non-vegan partners. Their reasoning is that the bodies of non-vegans are made up of the dead animals they have consumed.