Looking for some time wasting distractions? Of course you are.
Drench. Very simple, very addictive, very difficult to describe. Just press the colour buttons, watch the top left blocks and working it out from there.
This game manages to capture the experience of playing cricket while very drunk exceptionally well. For the Chris Tavare fans who’d rather stonewall a big score you can play it without the time limit here.
I’m currently writing epic and doubtlessly hugely influential posts on reforming the UK electoral system and vegetarianism. But while you’re waiting, some more links.
I’ve not watched any X Factor this season (and only under duress in previous series) but Jack Seale’s blog on the Radio Times site is so good that I just read it all the way back to the start. Most recent update here, click on “previous” for earlier entries. Amusingly, most people commenting make no reference to the articles, but simply lay in to Simon/Louis/ITV for whatever iniquity they have been responsible for this week.
Garfield minus Garfield, remove Garfield from Jim Davis’ tedious comics and suddenly an existential nightmare envelopes Jon … with hilarious results. Well, quite funny results, anyway.
The ever-excellent Pitch Invasion site has a genuinely touching article on supporting the Chicago Fire and their play-off game against the New England Revolution, plus the sites trademark quality photos. A useful corrective to anyone who likes to mock US soccer (like the idiot who wrote the last blog entry on here).
Lastly, congratulations to Wales on winning the Korfball Eurobowl Western Division and qualifying for their first ever European Championships. It’s reported with trademark lack of flair on the IKF site.
Elizabeth Lambert tries to prove otherwise.
Update: Jennifer Hewitt from the consistently interesting From A Left Wing blog points to the more serious issues involved.
Just look at the last endorsement. Obviously plenty of Americans do get irony, but good that some people out there are keeping up the stereotype.
For even less highbrow humour, reportage that pulls no punches. This is years old, but I still laugh every time.
When you’re living in the countryside getting a taxi is a bit more complicated than in the city where all you need to do is stick out an arm. No, invariably you have to book in advance, sometimes more than a day beforehand. One of the reasons why this might be is the taxi company in Church Stretton doubles as the undertakers, and when I was younger they drove the school bus too. The Welfare State may no longer guarantee to look after us from the cradle to the grave, but Morris and Son are willing to fill the breach. When I did manage to get organised enough to book one of their taxis I did think about asking them if they ever had to bring the hearse out for a taxi trip – perhaps if their regular car(s) broke down, but I guessed they’d probably heard the joke too many times.
Perhaps they also need the money on the side because they have broken the cardinal rule for taxi companies – having a name that goes right at the top of the alphabetical list in the phone book. This desperation is now getting to ridiculous levels. Old favourites like A2B and ABC taxis are being pushed down the list by more imaginative firms. I’m looking at the Shropshire Yellow Pages now (time hangs heavy) and A2B are only 4th, with ABC behind them. Just ahead are AAA Shrewsbury Taxis which at least looks like it could stand for something, but they are trumped by AAAAAA R&J of Shrewsbury who have abandoned all pretence of dignity in a desperate bid to get first place. Sadly, their efforts are in vain as they still fall behind AAAAAA 1st 4 Taxis who are clearly masters of the post-literate txtspk world. The multiple ‘A’ trick undoubtedly works, but I’m a little unsure that calling your firm something that resembles a scream of terror is going to encourage business.
One trick no-one seems to have used is going from the start of the dictionary and having Aardvark Taxis. Perhaps they fear that it will give people the impression of some kind of rickshaw, pulled by one of these:
It’s well known that one way you know you’ve made it to the super rich is to be able to buy yourself an uninhabited island in the Caribbean or even the Aegean. But it’s surely indicative of the ridiculous salaries in modern day football that a player can not just buy an island with a population of 65,000 people, but then give it away.
I was watching Omid Djalili the other day (and what more reliable source could there be) and he mentioned that Iranian carpetmakers will deliberately make an error in their designs, because only Allah is perfect.
I realise that discussing Islamic theology online is fraught with peril, particularly when I don’t know the first thing about it, but that seems a little presumptuous to me. Surely their innate human fallibility should ensure unintentional flaws, rather than them having to rely on deliberate mistakes to disfigure the carpets.
However, I’d be more concerned if this practice was replicated in other sections of the Iranian economy. Perhaps the reason Tehran does not have a flourishing automobile industry may well be down to people suspecting that the brakes might be faulty as a gesture of man’s imperfection.
Imagine if you were in an Iranian aeroplane. You’d probably be delighted to find that your seat adjuster or TV screen were broken, in the hope that you’d located the deliberate mistake. But you couldn’t be entirely certain that it wasn’t just a routine malfunction and that the undercarriage wasn’t deficient.
Perhaps the reason the US is so exercised by Ahmadinejad’s focus on nuclear power is not that they fear it being adapted for military usage, but simply that a meltdown may result from excessive fervency amongst its designers.
Alexander the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Pedro the Cruel. Many countries in Europe choose to regularly identify their rulers with an adjective, so much so that in Russia it seems that all you had to do was to survive the coronation to earn the appellation “great”. Further west, descriptions tended to be more personal, Charles the Bald, Louis the Fat and Joanna the Mad among those who’ve graced the palaces of Western Europe.
The kings and queens of England have proved relatively immune to this trend, especially after the Saxon kings like Alfred the Great, Æthelread the Unready and Edward the Confessor were displaced by the Normans. Our rulers have tended to be known by number alone – roman numerals to emphasise their elevated status. So Henry VIII is the name that is recorded in the history books, not Henry the Wifekiller. The truly great royals are noted in other ways; such as the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Award.
However, this is not the full story and many of our Kings and Queens did have contemporary nicknames based upon their personal, often sexual, peccadilloes that censorious historians, mindful of the impressionable minds of their young students, sought to suppress. They have been remarkably successful in this endeavour, with only the most evocative descriptions – like Richard Lionheart – remaining in popular consciousness, and then only distorted from its origins.
Now the true story is revealed. (more…)
More sub-The Onion nonsense
The controversy over the alleged distortions of the ITV Wales weather forecast grew today with sponsors bmi baby putting out a press release which appeared to contain admissions that they had been pressurising the programme to give deliberately erroneous forecasts. (more…)
Sub-The Onion nonsense
The government yesterday unveiled their most radical solution yet to the problem of paying for the UK’s ageing population. While social security minister, Chris Davison said that some of the details remained to be finalised, the government was firmly committed to the plan as the only other alternative sources of funding for the healthcare and pensions of Britain’s growing army of OAPs were outlandish ones like taxing those on high incomes.
The basic premise of the scheme is that every British citizen is to receive an implant that will detonate on the day after their 70th birthday, killing them reasonably quickly and without too much agonising pain. Explaining how the government had come up with the proposal, Davison revealed that he’d heard the phrase “pension’s time bomb” so often that it had put the idea into his head. For the same reason, he’d decided that a minor incendiary device was the best way to bring about the deaths of British citizens, even though medical experts suggested that lethal injection of some sort might be more humane. (more…)
