Obviously impressed by how far she has raised her previously minimal public profile by pandering to racism. the barking Margaret Hodge has sounded off again in the Observer.
Enough said.
Tag Archives: Rants
Almost Back Online
Well, this is a short one to say I am almost back online now, although the process has been far from easy. It is entertaining that in today’s modern world, having a short spell offline can cause more problems than you can shake a 32gb memory stick at.
It it hard to work out where to start with my ranting over this recent debacle, so I may be disjointed (no change there though). Some recent examples of the “traumas” (which are, admitedly mostly trivial!), have included such things as working out when the rubbish bins will be emptied. My house now has two types of bin (recycling and landfill), with a note saying they will be collected on alternate weeks. Nothing else. No idea which day of the week, or which week is which. Wonderful.
What the note did say was that to find out the day of collection, and which week was landfill and which was recylcing, I was told to “log on to the councils website and enter my address details.” Brilliant, except I didn’t have an internet connection. Continue reading
Tell me it’s not true?
Quintessential Rambling posted yesterday to say that he/she? thinks war with Iran is about to happen on the basis of an order for massive upping of missile cones, as seen before the last two rounds of global “Risk”.
This post has the horrible ring of truth. So I am just saying to the full pantheon of all deities, spaghetti-monsters, tooth fairies and all “Please, let this be too paranoid a conclusion”
The Armageddon-meisters on any of the constantly shifting sides in WWIII tend to be quietly confident that:
(a) they won’t actually have to do any killing or dying themselves. Lots of young men and women in the armed forces and millions of civilians who happen to been unfortunate in where they chose to be born will do that for them.
(b) they will be rewarded after death anyway when the big magic man rewards them for doing his righteous smiting.
I don’t suppose they care, but some of us are quite pleased to be alive on this planet. We’re not remotely convinced that we’ll be anything except wormfood when we’re not here anymore.
Basically, only having one shot at this life, some of us may value life a bit more than those people who think they’re going to a better one.
Dead atheism :-)
(This turned out to be too long for a comment on “is-atheism-over”)
My Freya (insert deity of choice whose name you want to take in vain). Who’d have thought atheism was a fashion and such a short-lived one as well? “Atheism struggling for breath” etc. Must I say LOL repeatedly (despite having almost been shamed out of it by a funny youtube diatribe against smileys)?
Sometimes you have to wonder if we all live on the same planet or if English has some weird new variant that means that our understanding of others’ words is doomed.
For a start atheism isn’t really an ism, otherwise we would have to have isms for everything that anyone didn’t believe. I am, for example, a devout adherent of my-pc-does-not-wake-at-night-and-play-football-with-the-teacups-ism. I suspect that almost anyone on the face of the planet is one as well.
Granted, it’s not always front page news that most averagely-sane people are also in this group. So, I guess I might have to accept that my-pc-does-not-wake-at-night-and-play-football-with-the-teacups-ism isn’t this month’s fashionable belief system.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that large numbers of people have been converted to my-pc-wakes-at-night-and-plays-football-with-the-teacups-ism.
Maybe it does. I made the mistake of referring to my pc there. It is with the fairies half the time anyway.
[tags]anti-atheist, atheism, atheist, fashion, Philosophy, Rants, Religion, Culture, Society[/tags]
Technical Problems
It seems Heathers problems with the crappy service from Virgin Media is not the only issue hitting this blog at the moment. Looking at the stats, it seems an awful lot of people are reading this blog via it’s feed rather than actually visiting the URL.
There seem to be two main options for people getting the feed. It either comes straight from the blogs feed (here) or from the feedburner feed. Recently, although the blogs feed has been working fine and includes all the latest posts, the feedburner one has been showing problems.
When I tried to investigate this, it seems that trying to connect to the blog feed from feedburner returns a server timeout error. This is not apparent why you try to access the feed direct, but also appears when you try to use feedvalidator to check the feed is valid. I find this really, really strange. Does any one have any ideas?
[tags]Technology, Feed, RSS, WhyDontYou, Why Dont You, Website, Site Admin, XML, Feedburner, Feedvalidator, Rants[/tags]
I told you so?
Ironically, a mere ten minutes after I made my last post about the terrible service provided by Virgin Media, I got a phone call from Heather saying the Engineer had been round. Now, this is the second visit booked by Virgin Media (i.e. two days off work) and Virgin have had eight days to get things sorted out. You would think this visit was going to be little more than a formality to plug in a new cable modem.
You would be wrong.
The engineer brought the cable modem, but didn’t have the right power cable. Sheer brilliance. Now, not only is there no way of knowing if that is indeed the real fault, but Heather took her second day off work for no reason at all. A new visit has been booked for Tuesday (13 days after the fault was reported), and hopefully this time the engineer will bring everything they need to see if it works. If it turns out to not be the modem, Thor only knows what they will suggest (another visit a week later, maybe?).
For some odd reason, Heather seems reluctant to close her account with Virgin (attachment to email address / website I suspect), despite the fact she could pretty much get an ADSL contract up and running in less time than this has taken. At it’s longest, I have had ADSL set up in 10 days… Virgin have not been able to help an existing, long serving, customer in that time. I suspect this is an example of a company which spends too much of it’s money and time trying to attract new business, rather than maintaining it’s current customer base…
[tags]virgin, virgin-cable, Thor, virgin-media, virginmedia, cable-tv, cable, bad-service, bad-shops, rant, rants[/tags]
Will Virgin Come Through?
Although heather has been without a functioning Cable Broadband service for over a week now (reported last Thursday), hopefully Virgin Media will have sent someone round to sort it out today. Personally I am not holding my breath that, even if they do, it will result in a functioning service worth the massive costs.
Shamefully, even though there have been multiple faults and several off-line periods in the last few weeks alone, all Virgin Media are giving as compensation for 8 days without a service is a £20 refund. I would find that almost insulting.
As I have mentioned one or two times previously, I am about to move house and looking at my options for a new internet service provider. Until about six weeks ago, I had Virgin as one of the main contenders and thought the TV/Broadband combo was well worth getting. Now, you couldn’t pay me.
I must say a big Well Done to Virgin Media, they took over cable companies with good customer service records, and generally very loyal customers, and managed to make a complete hash of everything. Brilliant. I bet Sky are laughing themselves to sleep every night…
[tags]virgin, virgin-cable, virgin-media, virginmedia, cable-tv, cable, bad-service, bad-shops, rant, rants[/tags]
Healthy Eating
This is not normally a topic I would stray into, but as Heather is hors de combat for a while, I thought I would give it a shot. It certainly strikes me as “bad science” but I may be wrong…
Given the way the UK has got on board this “healthy eating” campaign, it is not surprising that the supermarkets have pulled out all the plugs to use this woo to sell more products. On a fairly regular basis there are adverts on TV how this product or that product is “one of your five a day” with minimal reason behind the claims. It seems Sainsbury’s (supermarket chain) has joined in and in their infinite wisdom have decided that telling their customers how many grams of fat, carbohydrates/sugar, protein etc., are in their food is not effective. As part of the great dumbing down of the UK they now use a “traffic light” system. It is pretty embarrassing.
What intrigues me the most, is the apparently arbitrary nature of what gets a “green” compared to what gets an “amber” or “red” (I am assuming Green = Good and Red = Bad by the way, can food be “Bad?”). As a recent example, I bought a Sainsbury’s Cheese Ploughmans ready made sandwich which comes on malted bread with “seeds.” The packaging calls it “reduced fat, a healthier option.” In the picture, you can see what the traffic light system looks like, but please note, the fat and salt are supposed to be “amber” rather than red. Continue reading
Ancient History is becoming history
TV programmes on archeaology and ancient history are extremely popular. The history that engages most of us is usually in the distant past. It expands our understanding of what it is to be human. However, Ancient History is about to disappear as an A level subject, according to an article by Tom Holland in Saturday’s Guardian.
Tom Holland says “In modern schools, of course, history tends to mean Hitler”. There is mountains of material on 20th century history, not just original papers but film, sound recordings and interviews with living people. This reminds me of a Guardian TV critic’s comment I read a few years ago to the effect that, having a cable TV connection, the critic could now pick out individual faces at the Nuremberg rallies. Continue reading
Blame the scapegoat
I know it hasn’t been long since I ranted about the craziness in the UK media nowadays, but listening to local and national radio tends to have this effect on me. One of the main headlines over the last few days have been the revelations from the Terrorism Trial which found five British Citizens guilty of terrorism charges. Part of the surveillance footage showed the now-convicted terrorists in conversation with two men who later (a year or so later) went on to bomb the London underground (7 Jul 05).
This “find” has motivated the survivors (or at least a media-friendly subset of them) of the London Tube Bombing to call for an “Independent Inquiry” into the Security Service (MI5) investigation. As with lots of things which become news items in the UK it has the air of self evident truth and “justice” but on second glance it really is pointlessly mad.
The radio news I have been listening to has been crowing over the “outrage” the survivors have felt that MI5 had two of the bombers under surveillance a year before the blast, with the implication (often stated) that if the Service had acted against them earlier they would have disrupted the bombing and the 55 odd people would not have died. Sounds reasonable enough, doesn’t it? Continue reading
Stepford wives and husbands
An advert on the radio today offered men the opportunity to avoid having to go to female salons -a men’s beauty parlour was offering a full range of services including “traditional waxing”. My knowledge of tradition is obviously lacking because I didn’t know about it. To my outdated ideas, “traditional” barbers offered men shaves with hot towels and a cuththroat razor, rather than waxing. I didn’t know men were queuing up in women’s salons to get waxed and go on sunbeds and get manicures.
It’s almost tragic to me that men are going down the self-hating route – the starving themselves, plucking out hairs, smothering themselves in chemicals in case they might sweat and all the rest. OK, there’s an element of justice, here. If women have to do it, then it seems only fair that so should men. Continue reading
More Bad Science?
It seems this is the week for nonsense “science” being thrown about by people who really should know better. This latest instalment may not be bad science, there are lots of fallacies which may well apply, but I will leave that up to you to judge.
Here in the sunny green and pleasant land of the UK, the TV and Radio were carrying a news bulletin, which has been picked up in the print press today, which explained that a Charity (Alcohol Concern) was calling for the Government to ban children under the age of 15 drinking alcohol at home. Seriously. Alcohol Concern are concerned [puns always intended] that a Government report shows the number of 11 – 13 year olds who “binge drink” has increased dramatically (I do not know what the figures for this are, sorry).
Depending on which news / radio station you caught this on, the feedback was mixed. In some of the “older listener” channels, there was applause at such good suggestions and heartfelt condemnation of “today’s youth” who are all alcoholic rebels, unlike any other time in the past… On the “younger listener” stations this was met with outrage and shock anyone would be daft enough to suggest it.
Continue reading
Diving headfirst into the dark side
The things I do for you….
Intrigued by the concept of Gog in the last post, I had to google gog. I found a truly scary websmite. Contender Ministries’ “the Coming War of Gog and Magog” basically sees the world in terms of two camps – Israel and the West vs the Muslim world.
(And guess which side He is supposed to be on? No prizes, sorry. Though someone offered the Contender websmite a million dollars if they could actually prove that the Sodom and Gomorrah bit in the Bible meant homosexuality. They scathed the email writer.) Continue reading
Rapturous
Spurred by a post here that mentioned that some Pat Robertson followers have the date of the Rapture pinned down to a very specific 13 Sept 2007, I thought it best to do a bit of emergency last minute research on the Internet.
Rapture? Some of you will immediately think of a 70s or 80s (?) record by Blondie or the name of a current band. Get with the programme. It means Armageddon, the Apocalypse, and lots of other really Bad Things..
OK, I’ve already confused you haven’t I – human extinction and rapture? Not easy to see an upside, is it? Don’t fret, there are loads of websites that can only see the end of humanity on earth as a Very Good Thing.
I’m following Google here, which is a broad measure of the top ranking sites on a given topic. Number One with a bullet is Rapture ready.com (I just can’t bring myself to post a link) Continue reading
Virgin really crying out to be sacrificed now
Grrr. Virgin Cable TV:-
Sky One= no great loss.
FX = only channel you can legitimately watch the Wire on UK TV.
Happily rewatching series 4 tonight, ready to catch all the smart bits of dialogue that I didn’t quite get the first time or read the messages supposedly coded into Omar’s t-shirts by the costume designers that I wasn’t paying attention to. And so on.
Screen goes blank five minutes after the credits.
Ominous blue box comes up, holding the words that I’m not authorised to view this channel.
So it costs about £80 a month – for broadband, tv and a phone I make barely half a dozen local calls on – no matter what the ads say – and they can’t even pay out the Wire now?