For Tom and Joe

Non-Touch Soap Dispensers - utter madness.

. . . . . . . and the next thing you do after you've touched a normal soap pump?

here's a quote from the Dettol website -
The starter kit includes a dispenser, one hand soap refill, and four AA batteries. When you use the DETTOL No-Touch Hand Wash System, you'll know you're helping your family by fostering proper and effective handwashing to help prevent the spread of harmful germs.

What a silly, untruthful, wasteful, useless piece of utter junk!

Reverse Alarms

Just a quickie . . . . yesterday a chap arrived at a parking space in micra-sized car (the older small version I mean, not the new monster).   I could hear his reverse alarm from where I was sat, on the wall, having a quiet ciggy.  Without once looking round at where he was going, he started to reverse - steadily the BEEP became more insistant, and then 2-foot from the bumper of the car behind him the alarm's beeping became a single (warning?) note.   He plonked back into 1st gear and drove off, still never having actually looked at the parking space (which he could have got into). 
Absolute, total, unfailing belief in a crappy piece of technology.
Fantastic.

Tomi's Wisdom

Ah my boy!  Over the years I've received some priceless comments from Tom,
three of them below.

"Papa?  - Racing cars
never really get
anywhere do they?" 
(Tomi Evans-Krings, 4 years old)


Excited:  "PAPA !!!!  -
I know how you make paper!  
Make the screen all white . . .
and then print it out!"
(Tomi Evans-Krings, 5 years old)


"But  . . . .  the next
thing you do is
wash your hands!!"

Just seen a UK TV advert for a 'non-touch' soap dispenser
(to avoid getting ALL THOSE GERMS from a dispenser top) 
(Tomi Evans-Krings, 13 years old)

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The Queen, Kate, Obama and the Essential Ash Cloud

An exhausted Michelle - stranded at Edinburgh, keeps her head down as the Ash cloud settles.

What a fantastically cohesive response this essential relationship provided to the renewed threat from Iceland's Grimsvotn volcano - spewing its poisonous, plane-ripping swirls of ash into the midnight sky!

FANTASTIC!  The Queen, only back less than a day from her essential trip to Eire to see Michael O'Leary, Ryan Air boss (he personally oversees every single flight with his name on it, so over-worked for the state occasion that he forgot to say 'yes' to an Edinburgh flight stranded on the ash-spewn tarmac).
But she doesn't stop there - oh no . . . our Monach speeds back to blighty, where her and the newly weds greet Pres Obama and Michelle on their essential trip to the UK.  The relationship this mighty team create is described on BBC TV news reports as 'Essential' - and to make sure no-one worried too much, we were told this SEVEN times in ONE five-minute session during the 6pm news.

Essentially, Obama brings 1,500 helpers with him to the UK - each with a 1 Ltr bottle of Evian water. - They circle a stricken reservoir in Ryan Air-force ONE, open a fan-light in the toilet and pour the contents out - thus ending the possibility of a summer-long drought in ash-torn UK.   Monies collected from this action (toilet fees to Ryan Air) will be distributed amongst Icelandic banking refugees in the coming weeks.

That'll show them eh?  Send up an Ash cloud would you?  Eh ... eh? Well take THAT!  We have our Queen, Ireland, president Obama , Michelle, Kate, Will  - we're READY buddy!  We're stood over here, on UK territory and you just see if that essential ash cloud can doing anything now ... haha ...... think you're big don't you eh?  Think you can float over here do you?, building all over our women, raping our jobs ..... ha!  You'll SEE, we're ESSENTIAL we are.

Eurovision

Ell and Nikki win for Azerbaijan

Well, I watched the last hour or so - and what a fantastic show, a seriously amazing set - and annoyingly all one week before I land in Dusseldof myself.

Norton Kills the Joy

Still in some sort of 1990's national state-of-mind concerning Eurovision, Mr Graham Norton is in serious danger of appearing so yesterday (as I'm sure he probably described some dress, some hair, some dance - whatever, last night) by inserting sneering little jibes into each and every appearance of anything that he thinks we can snigger at.  "Haha - he's only 59 years old, he looks like he's 90 - hahaha"

Still doing it aren't we? Still being taught to sneer at everything, to use trivial non-commenting as if it's humour.

Stop it Mr Norton, European countries out perform the UK in everything nowadays, every day of every week.  And if some of them do this whilst remaining so yesterday - then thank God, because today's UK style, as populated by people like you - can only ever be NULS POINTS.

Sandi Toksvig,The One Show and all that . . .

I hesitated a while before going off on this one.  Having discovered Radio 4 at about 30 years old, and still listening everyday now, 158 years later, it has always (along with BBC 4) represented to me that solid, quality side of life that surprises, delights and informs.

But I have a problem.

Or rather two, (damn - now I've gone and mixed-up numbers for numbers, and typed numbers, and my backspace key was recently vapourised by a passing death-ship from the plant 'Aaarggo' - so you're stuck with it)

Blimmey! Where was I? - oh yeah, TWO problems:

Sandi Toksvig and 'The One Show' - these two are not linked, incidentally, in anything other than the fact that their . . . stuff, comes out of the same hole in my radio when the little light says 92.9, in rather a cool blue tone.

You see satire is good.  But this sneering, complicit, self-conglatutory mush is disturbing in the extreme - and funny, it seriously isn't. Bendan O'Neill (Guardian)  writes: really only massaging our prejudices, stroking our cynicism, rather than challenging us to think about the world differently. Alexander Pope said satirists should "without sneering teach the rest to sneer". Today, in our era of sneering, satire risks becoming a self-congratulatory, back-patting display of shared public cynicism.

It says all I want to - and it's here >> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/05/comedy

and Sandie?

I don't like her voice, her sneering manner, and I hate that paused "erm . . . " after a delivery to give us time to laugh.   Don't bother, it's very rarely funny enough for that.