And is their German leader called Herr Kutz?

You Couldn't Make It Up Dept.

From the Beeb:

Sixteen Amish women and men charged with beard- and haircutting attacks against fellow Amish have plead [sic] not guilty in an Ohio court.

The six women and 10 men are charged with hate crimes motivated by religious differences, conspiracy and assault.

The suspects are also accused of trying to destroy evidence, including shears, a bag of hair and a disposable camera.

Prosecutors say the attacks were part of a feud directed by a breakaway Amish bishop ...

Name?

... Samuel Mullet.

Oh yeah!

Spot The Difference

Yvette Cooper was interviewed on the Andrew Marr Show.

As reported by The Guardian:



And by the Daily Mail:



Same photo, different crop by picture editor. Newspapers that clearly know their readership.

Best Butter ...

... as my mother used to call insincere flattery.

I normally delete commercial spam comments as soon as they arrive, but this one was so OTT I thought I ought to share it with you. I'll even include the spammer's name so that they get the full benefit of the publicity.

From Medical Billing Services in California, in response to the post Health Going Backwards:

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Pure slime. Love it.

The Portaloo Massacre

OK, that title is stretching the point to bursting in the pursuit of a minor witticism, but I couldn't help laughing when this vehicle turned up to my place of work the other day.

(And I've had that title in my head for weeks, and I will probably never get to use it otherwise.)

That Moment When ...

... you realise that the world is spinning off into some misty and inexplicable future, and is leaving you far behind.

What the fucking fuck are 'treggings'?

High Standarts

Seen in Tesco recently:



Click for bigger

I 'did' Russian at school (failed with O-level grade 8, but it was a hard language with three genders and more cases than the carousel at Terminal 5, was my excuse), and it has left me with a few basic words and an ability to read - slowly - Cyrillic script. So if I ever see Russian written down I always try to read it out, even if my understanding of what it means is very limited. I like having a John Cleese moment.

I was drawn to these bottles straight away for this reason, amongst others. The script says "Russkiy Standart" ("Russian Standard" - Russian borrows heavily from English). But it was the prices that brought out the camera phone.

Tesco Value - 500ml for only£12, and 750ml for £11. Do you think they ever sell the little bottles? Don't answer that.

Dog Beer

Yes, really. While on the hunt for something suitable for Anna in the final hours before the Christmas shut-down, I bumped into this in a local 'everything' store, and I had to get it for Bonkers Dog.



It's non-alcoholic, which is a relief. He's mad enough without adding beer-rage to his kitbag of moods.

Complementary food for dogs.
Best served at room temperature.

Small to medium dogs ½ bottle per day. Medium to large dogs 1 bottle per day. Shake before use. Contains no alcohol. On opening, keep refrigerated and use within 3 days. Do not store below 4°C. Do not expose to direct sunlight.

The ingredients list would curl the hair of any Righteous control-freak:

Composition:
Meat and animal derivatives, Cereals.

Analytical constituents:
Crude Protein 0.8%, Crude Fat 0.18%, Crude Fibre 0.18%, Crude Ash 0.5%, Moisture 98.3%.

Not sure what the remaining 0.04% is - poison, probably.

It's made in the Netherlands, and the company even have a website, www.dogbeer.eu.

He loved it.

You WHAT?

From the Grauniad:

The Labour party has made a "serious complaint" to the BBC about a lack of political balance in its news coverage as it attempts to reinvigorate Ed Miliband's leadership and counter what it sees as widespread media bias in favour of the David Cameron-led coalition.

I have no words.

Footwear for Christmas Shopping

What Not To Wear:



Grandma wearing Crocs with socks, grand-daughter wearing Tesco Value Ugg Boots.

Crocs are a horrendous crime against taste in any event. They look like those ghastly jelly sandals you had for the beach when you were a kid, but without the carefree style, panache and pretty colours. Not only do they look awful, but they make you think of sweaty, scaly feet and horn-like yellow toenails. Yuk. But to wear them with socks? Dear oh dear.

Ugg boots are an uggly shape and make the wearer look flat-footed, like a cartoon drawn by someone who has difficulty with the human form. But at least the real ones look well-made and like they might last more than ten minutes. These were from a pound shop, I think, and looked profoundly uncomfortable.

(Before you think I am making fun of people who are too poor to afford proper clothes, I should say that this was in a queue for the most expensive knicky-knacky shop in the area and they arrived in a newish 4x4. I was there merely because I knew what I had to get for my Secret Santee at work, and there was only one place to get it. Honest.)

How to do it better?

This wasn't a bad effort:

I know it's adolescent, but ...

I did have a chuckle at this:

He was comforted in his final moments by his wife Dagmara and several nuns, his secretary was quoted as saying.

Great man, poor choice of words.

Change and Decay, In All Around I See

From this week, bin collections have been changed from Tuesday to Friday.

This is going to take a while to bed in. After 20 years, my body clock (in 'weekly' mode) had just about got used to Tuesday.

Beautiful Numbers

I hated maths at school. I think my brain wasn't ready for it, but the sheer abstractness of it put me off. I was bright enough to survive it, but I didn't love it. Now, of course, I think it is brilliant. I can't fill the car or bike without spending the next ten miles working out in my head the mpg figure from the miles recorded and litres put in. My mathematical understanding is at a very basic level, of course - arithmetic, algebra, 2D geometry, a bit of statistics, a bit of calculus - but I suspect it is better than most, and these days I find the subject both intriguing and compelling. (If it tickles you too, have a look at a book called Nature's Numbers by Ian Stewart, where he delves into the maths behind all kinds of natural phenomena from dripping taps to the arrangement of cells in a sunflower head. Amazing book.)

I was therefore mildly thrilled to find this clip over at Rosie's place. It's a series of 15 unconnected pendulums (OK, Latin scholars, pendula) with monotonically-increasing lengths. (I looked this up and the explanation was way beyond my comprehension, but I suspect if the lengths were metal bars instead of pendula, there would be a musical relationship between them. Maths and music are intertwined. But that's a guess.)

"The period of one complete cycle of the dance is 60 seconds. The length of the longest pendulum has been adjusted so that it executes 51 oscillations in this 60 second period. The length of each successive shorter pendulum is carefully adjusted so that it executes one additional oscillation in this period. Thus, the 15th pendulum (shortest) undergoes 65 oscillations."

Set them going, and watch the patterns. Absolutely beautiful.

Well, durr ...

Apparently, Kent has been fairly quiet:

Kent Fire and Rescue Service said there were no major incidents in the county on Saturday night.

"We went to a few false alarms which turned out to be bonfires, which happens every bonfire night," said a spokesman.

Yes.

Quite a queue!

Apparently, I am the 76,014,082,892nd member of the species Homo Sapiens to be born.

On the day I was born, the world's population was 2,772,772,874. Today it has just passed 7,000,000,000.

Crikey.

Seen In The Post Office

He's, er, diversifying.

I want this on a T-shirt.

TMI

I ran into a girl I used to work with a few weeks ago while doing the weekly shop. She was with a new partner, very pregnant, and seemed extremely happy. She's a nice girl - sensible, good sense of humour, sociable, pleasant. We learned that we were both on Facebook and later 'friended', as they say. She had the baby recently. Imagine my surprise when today I received this status update from her on my Wall:



Perhaps I am new to this, but ... WTF?

Skoolboy Error

Well, up until midday on Sunday it was a wonderful weekend. I collected both daughters and the partner of one, and we travelled to her old University town on Saturday for the graduation ceremony. The whole thing was in Latin, which I rather liked, being something of a traditionalist, and it was fun trying to keep up with what was being said. D1 was duly doctored, we had a pleasant lunch with her Mum and new partner, and then after checking into the Travelodge and having a 'freshen up' (which for me meant a quiet lie down with a book, OK a snooze) we met again for an excellent meal in the city, overlooking the river. Quail for starters, Wood Pigeon for main. Good game, good game. The weather was kind, and everyone agreed it had been a wonderful day.

We set off on Sunday morning and got about half-way to the house they all shared when I decided to get the car filled up for the journey back to the West. £66-worth of Shell's finest on board, and off we went. Six miles later, the car started to misfire, I pulled into a layby, and before the wheels had stopped turning it had conked out for good.

Anyone who has done what I did will have guessed by now. Coincidence? No. Dirty fuel? Unliklely. Look at the receipt ... oh fucksticks.

Yup, having juggled successfully with unleaded for the bikes and diesel for the car for many, many years, having laughed at people who couldn't tell the difference between a green and a black nozzle, who didn't realise that diesel and petrol smell completely different, I made the cardinal error for diesel car owners. I had filled it with unleaded. And then driven it six miles.

This was the point at which I learned that my RAC Recovery subscription (meant to get you to your destination if you break down completely) doesn't cover pilot error, and that a 10-mile tow to the nearest suitable garage is all they will do in these circumstances. Having said that, they had a truck to us within 30 minutes, the garage took around an hour to drain the tank, flush the fuel lines and get the car running under its own steam once more, and a couple of hours after my "Doh!" moment we were on our way again. The only damage was about two hours of a lovely day lost in hanging around, just over £200 for the drain and flush, and £66-worth of perfectly good unleaded taken out and earmarked for the owner's Jag, I should imagine. Thank God for credit cards, because I was spent up.

I blame motorcyclists. I really do.

When we pulled into the petrol station, there were a couple of classic bikes there, a tidy BSA and a Velocette. At the pump next to mine was a very nice 1966 Triumph Thunderbird, and I had a chat with the owner before I reached for the nozzle and ... I think in those few minutes my brain had defaulted to bike mode, that's all.

I was chatting with a guy on a Land Rover forum many years ago, and he told me the story of his father-in-law, who had committed the same silly mistake. His punishment was that his son-in-law made up a sticker to go above the fuel filler, reading "It's Diesel, You Tit".

I've got one on order.

Two approaches to speed enforcement

Here's a hint if you are riding a bike and see an unexpected speed camera: DON'T brake so hard that you crash. Courtesy of the online bike magazine Visordown, here we have two unlucky (or incompetent) bikers who did just that. What happened afterwards depends on where you live.

The Swiss biker, one Boris Maier from Bern, bailed out and was photographed sliding down the road next to his bike. The Dutch biker, an unnamed 50-year-old, well ... the same, really. Here's Boris, slowing gradually down from a measured 107 kph (66 mph):



... and here's Mr Nobody, having just been clocked at 137 kph (85 mph):



The Swiss biker was fined and told that another 3 kph would have lost him his licence. The Dutch biker wasn't charged with anything. The reasoning of the Dutch prosecutors was that, as he was technically not riding the bike at the time, no offence had been committed. I wonder how the Swiss justified charging Boris? Is there a law against sliding down the road while looking like a Power Ranger?

Serious point, though: let's say you were caught doing 60 mph just ten feet outside a 30 limit. Have you committed an offence? There is prima facie evidence that you did, as no vehicle on earth could accelerate fast enough to get you from a legal 30 to a legal 60 in that short distance*. But you were not speeding at the time the incident was recorded, so did not commit an offence. You must have broken the law, but you did not break the law. Any legal eagles know the answer to this one?

At one time, I am pretty sure that British law would have taken the Dutch approach - technically not an offence, guy's had his punishment, say no more about it. But now I think we would think like the Swiss: any evidence of lawbreaking must be cracked down on, hard, no matter how humourless or unreasonable.

I've heard a lot of good things about the Swiss, particularly their attitude to gun ownership and their use of referenda. But I wouldn't want to live there and ride a motorbike.

* My maths isn't up to calculating the rate of acceleration needed to do this, so I am making an assumption. If anyone knows better, you are very welcome to correct me.

Travellers?

I see from the BBC website that:

Travellers at Dale Farm in Essex have vowed to resist eviction by locking themselves to property on the site.

Let me get this straight. These people are 'Travellers', and they are protesting about being made to move on because they want to stay in the same place where they have built a permanent, static community.

This is a new definition of 'travelling' of which I was previously unaware.

What about a Bin-By Date?

There's a whole lot of hoo-hah going on at the moment about the supposedly confusing sell-by, display-by, best before and use-by dates. Apparently, people don't understand them and they are going to be simplified. Yet another example of government interference producing a result which was never intended.

Longrider says all I would wish to say on the subject, but I would add just one thought:

Why is Man the only species on the planet that needs a use-by date on his food in order to know it is safe?