Epic, epic Moment of Zen from last night’s Daily Show.
04.03.10
17:39:49 - Comments (View)
17:39:49 - Comments (View)
link, news, killer whales, headline, epic, daily mail, religion,
Whale that killed its trainer at SeaWorld 'must be stoned to death', says American religious group
Headline of the day, courtesy of (where else) the Daily Mail. Oh, and it gets better: They also said the head trainer at the Orlando theme park where the incident took place a week ago should suffer a similar fate.
How Wootton Bassett became the town that cried
I don’t know whether it’s because this town is near where I grew up, or because my dad worked at the airbase mentioned for many years, or the sheer quality of the writing, but this article brought a lump to my throat. For all that I may be completely against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I have a huge amount of respect for the armed forces themselves, and the men and women who serve in them. This tale of the repatriation of bodies is a real tear-jerker, and drives home the point that each dead soldier is an individual.
I don’t want to be rude but, really, you have the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk and the question I want to ask is: ‘Who are you? I’d never heard of you. Nobody in Europe had ever heard of you.’
Ukip MEP Nigel Farage criticises EU President Herman van Rompuy after his first speech to the EU Parliament.
OK, we know Nigel Farage is an utter twat of a politician, and that his party is wrong on so many points concerning Europe (but is happy to jump on the gravy train and absolutely milk the expenses for personal gain), but it amuses me when sentences start with “I don’t want to be rude, but…”, no matter who says it.
Invariably, something rude follows shortly thereafter, and it’s as if the speaker thinks his first words allow him to say whatever the fuck he wants, no matter how rude.
See also: “With all due respect…”
EDIT: Great comment on the Guardian story, from problemchimp:
who the f**ck is Nigel Farage, We’ve never heard of “him” in Europe. sounds like a small man in a small party looking for attention to please his handful of supporters. so UKIP are in tune with the British people with about 0.5% support? move on!
News In Briefs
Non-brits might not be aware of the concept of Page 3 girls in our newspapers. In our red-tops, the bottom end of the newspaper market commonly called tabloids, there is a tradition of having a topless girl on page 3, so it’s the first thing(s) you see when you open it up. The Sun is the most famous for doing this, but the Daily Star does it too. I think this whole tradition started in the 70s, and it’s made a few celebrities out of the readers’ favourites over the years. It’s a bit of an anachronism nowadays, but who doesn’t want to start the day with a nice pair of boobs in front of them?! What has started appearing recently, though, is the little ‘News In Briefs’ paragraph attached to the page 3 photo. In this micro-column, the girl of the day gives her opinion on one of the bigger stories of the day. Well, it’s supposedly her opinion… It’s pretty obvious that it’s just a hastily written blurb by some journalist on The Sun, and handily it always reflects the Sun’s latest editorial position. Usually they contain some godawful pun too. I’ve always been amused by them, and thankfully some random soul is creating an archive of them all online. It’s funny to see them all in one place and revel in their awfulness. AMII, 23, from Birmingham AMII hopes ranting President Ahmadinedjad’s boast that Iran is a nuclear power will blow up in his face. She said: “It’s one thing to brag to an adoring mob about having produced your first weapons-grade enriched uranium. But to have achieved perfect composition of uranium-235 through isotope separation is quite a different kettle of nuclear fish in my book. Sanctions will show he’s not a big beast – just an atomic kitten.” Epic.
To what extent are we just little lemmings that they just throw down a track and we’re crash-test dummies? I mean, this is our lives.
This quote earlier in the week from Australian luger Hannah Campbell-Pegg now seems all the more poignant with the news that Georgian competitor Nodar Kumaritashvili has died after a training accident on the track.
Tonight’s opening ceremony has suddenly become secondary news, you have to feel.
Expenses body to cost six times more than MPs' payback
File under: epic, epic irony. Although this figure of £6.6 million doesn’t take into account the fact that this new body is replacing the existing Commons Fees Office, which must require funding itself every year. So it’s not quite as sky-high a cost as it might seem at first. And to be honest, the problem with the MPs’ expenses scandal was never the money, which in the grand scheme of things amounted to a relative pittance. The public was outraged because of the sheer audacity of the system as a whole, and the lack of contrition from MPs once they were caught. We didn’t particularly care that the abuses were “only” in the tens of thousands of pounds range; it was the fact that these people were elected by us, and are supposedly our moral guardians, yet took us for a ride. They should be as clean as a whistle, but they’ve been shown to be horribly dirty. Saying “it was within the rules” isn’t an excuse either. The rules were wrong, and they were allowed to continue being wrong because it suited the MPs to maintain that state of affairs as they milked the system. It’s not a valid excuse to work within the absolute letter of the law when that law is inherently flawed. This upcoming election is going to be very interesting, because there’s a lot of people very pissed off with the whole political system, probably more than are apathetic towards it all. We have low election turnouts in this country anyway, but this year could be worse than usual. My prediction is a lot of smaller parties and independents getting elected, standing on an anti-politics or anti-Westminster manifesto. They’ll represent something a bit different than career politicians, I hope, and will bring something fresh to parliament.
Now, there’s nothing I love more than some absolutely rank hypocrisy from those who we elect to govern us. One of the news stories that caught my eye today involved Birmingham City Council making 2,000 workers redundant in an effort to balance the books.
This is despite saying in October last year that only 800 jobs would be lost, and that these would be through natural wastage, not redundancies. Of course, the latest news is that voluntary redundancies will be a big part of the 2,000 jobs to go.
It got me thinking about whether those at the top of Birmingham council are planning to undergo similar financial hardships this year, as a sign of solidarity with their underlings.
A little investigation later, and it turns out that council leader Mike Whitby and his fellow councillors aren’t exactly in step with their comrades.
Last June, Whitby and three other senior councillors awarded themselves an extra £15,000 for attending a few more meetings each year. Previously, attendance at these meetings came with no extra salary.
A mere two weeks ago, Whitby joined the board of the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce, which I’m pretty certain isn’t an unpaid role.
I hate to link to the Taxpayers’ Alliance, despite their well-placed apostrophe, but in June they looked at Chief Executive Stephen Hughes’ pay packet: a whopping £200,000+ per year. This is as a result of an 18.2% pay rise over two years, way, way above the inflation rate. Not exactly a minuscule salary, is it?
To cap it all, the council’s auditors have refused to sign off on the 2008/9 accounts, citing a number of shortfalls in the budget. Most notably, the council claims that their property assets amount to £6.6 billion, whereas the auditors value them at £5.5 billion.
This has lead to a “black hole” in the council’s finances of around £60 million, resulting in the job cuts.
There’s been no statement from either of these senior councillors that they will take any pay cuts or forgo bonuses because of the perilous state of Birmingham’s finances. No doubt they’ll quietly award themselves various bonuses for meeting targets…
Fat and toothless children no longer attractive enough for nation's paedophiles | newsarse.com
I love NewsArse sometimes. It’s a satirical news website which occasionally comes up with an absolute gem. A British version of the Onion, but usually less subtle. This line is brilliant: “One paedophile, who wished to remain nameless for fear of losing his role in the House of Lords, told us…”. That’s very clever.
I tried putting a Post-It note over the offending part of her anatomy, but that wasn’t good enough apparently.
OK, it’s a bit of a non-story, some manufactured spluttering from the Daily Mail directed towards the BBC, but I loved this quote. Apparently, the director of some antiques TV show wanted a painting moved so as not to show a nipple on screen, even if it’s a centuries-old nipple in oil on canvas, in the background of the shot.
It amused me that the thought of putting a post-it note on it even occurred to the owner of the antiques shop in question. I think all paintings of this ilk need post-it notes for sensitive eyes…
