Horseplay

A friend of mine who is a butcher put up a "No Horse" sign in the shop he works at, as a jokey reference to the horse meat scandal last week. Yesterday someone asked if they could take a photo to use to illustrate media stories, and today, the BBC, Reuters and the Guardian all use the image:

They didn't actually plug the shop the sign is at though.

Sympathy For Jamie Oliver

When parents send their children to school with a Smarties sandwich you do begin to wonder whether the thick tongued mockney control freak has a point.

Quote Of The Day

On the Scottish Euromillions winners:

Neighbours described their only hobby as ‘takeaways’ 

Prezza Preaches Privacy Probe Priority, Pronto!

I don't approve of journalists hacking into John Prescott's phone, but everyone must remember they didn't do it to invade his privacy they just wanted an up to date directory of every fast food outlet in London.

In A Pickle

"Let's Pickle a few more costly commissions"

I don't think that the Telegraph's leader writers understand what pickling does. Yes there is a minister called Pickles so naturally they want to make a pun on his name but pickling is a method of preserving something in it's current state for a long period of time, in other words by asking to pickle costly commissions the Telegraph is asking that we keep them going in perpetuity.

Yes I do realise that this is probably the most tedious and trivial post that I have ever written.

Bring The Marmalade

A major fire has stopped production at the Warburtons bread factory in Greater Manchester.

It's more of a toast factory really.

I Know That They're An Aphrodisiac But Really!

On the one hand I do feel sorry for these fishermen:

FISHING bosses have BANNED moving oysters from southern England after thousands of the shellfish contracted HERPES.

No oysters are being allowed to move in or out of a major breeding area in a desperate bid to stop the disease spreading.

The lock-down has sealed the mouth of the Thames Estuary from Kent to Essex.

Local fishermen are fuming that they will have to stop fishing for the tasty catch — which sell for £3 each in posh restaurants — until the outbreak is dealt with.

But really they shouldn't have been fucking the molluscs in the first place.

Stuff

Three quick things:

1. My problems with my computer have flaired up again, possibly because the shop I took it to previously fobbed me off. Therefore blogging may be light again until Monday.
2. It's ironic that one of Disney's most iconic characters, Donald Duck, is famous for being naked from the waist down and yet I have received a lifetime ban from all Disney stores.
3. Wetherspoons pub chain offer a bacon roll and a coffee at breakfast for £1.50, isn't that great value?

Confectionery- A Key Industry!

Despite the tightening of the opinion polls since January, Labour clearly do not believe that they have a chance of winning the election or they wouldn't be proposing laws like this:

A 'Cadbury's Law' to prevent foreign takeovers of key British firms will be in Gordon Brown's manifesto on Monday.

Currently, a simple majority of shareholders can accept a takeover. Labour wants that threshold raised to two-thirds in firms where there is a national interest in keeping a company British.

It is almost certainly illegal under EU law, secondly discouraging investment in British industry could only be a bad thing and thirdly since when is the manufacture of chocolate and associated confectionery a vital national concern?

Do You Want Fries With That?

This probably comes under the category of "things I kind of already knew but didn't wish to dwell upon", how a burger is made:

the hamburgers were made from a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps that were ground together at a plant in Wisconsin. The ingredients came from slaughterhouses in Nebraska, Texas and Uruguay, and from a South Dakota company that processes fatty trimmings and treats them with ammonia to kill bacteria.

Uruguay, so at least the burgers are multicultural!

Those low-grade ingredients are cut from areas of the cow that are more likely to have had contact with feces, which carries E. coli, industry research shows.

Anyway just thought I'd put that up for the benefit of anyone who is going to read this before dinner.

Death By Chocolate

They say it's an accident but apparently the victim had a Bounty on his head.

Sorry I know that was in bad taste I shouldn't Snicker especially as his colleagues must really need a Boost right now, he wasn't just some Drifter.

Told You So.

Putin likes a big juicy sausage. I'm not sure why this is news I've been going on about it for almost a year.

And Then We Can Bring Back The Corn Laws!

I've just seen the Lib Dem Agriculture spokesman, Tim Farron, on television outlining his party's food policies. The idea is to:

o Ensure farmers and consumers both get a fair price for food by creating a legally binding supermarket code, enforced by a powerful proactive Food Market Regulator.

So the Lib Dems want to empower a quango to raise prices on essentials, in the middle of a recession, in order to protect one relatively small sectional interest. It would also be likely to harm the relatively poor in order to benefit the relatively well off.

Dolphins- Eco Terrorists.

You learn something new everyday- Dolphin Friendly tuna is far more damaging to the environment than the kind that is unfriendly to the bottle nosed bastards. It all comes down to how you locate the tuna:

the main variation lies in how the large group of tuna is located. There are basically three ways to do this.

1) Get lucky and happen to stumble across a large group of tuna visible from the surface in the middle of an enormous ocean. Obviously, this isn’t terribly practical.

2) Attract tuna using floating objects. Stay tuned, we’ll come back to #2.

3) Follow dolphins, because dolphins in the Eastern Tropical Pacific are often associated with large schools of tuna. Dolphins are easy to follow because, unlike tuna, they have to come up for air.

.......

As a result of pressure from environmental activist groups like Greenpeace, it became illegal to fish using method #3, and we now have what is called “dolphin safe tuna”. ..

Recall that method #1 isn’t feasible. Tuna fishing fleets rapidly switched over to method #2, attracting tuna using floating objects.

It is poorly understood why fish in the open ocean flock in such huge numbers to floating objects, but is a near universal phenomenon. If you put a log in the middle of the ocean, within hours it will be surrounded by fish.
.....
The big problem with this method is that floating objects don’t only attract tuna. EVERYTHING is attracted to floating objects, including sea turtles, sharks, seabirds, billfish, and, yes, dolphins!

So the moral here is that dolphins are evil. No wait the moral is that don't look at nice fuzzy sounding phrases like "dolphin friendly" without making an effort to understand what it actually means. I had always vaguely assumed that it meant putting some sort of object on the nets that the dolphins could see or hear and get out of the way but that's not how it works.

Hmmmm Bacon.

The Bacon Explosion- an ideal lunchtime snack.

Thought For The Day.

No food item has a more unappetising name than "Digestive Biscuits". Who originally thought that it would be a good idea to promote a biscuit by reminding people of the digestive process?

Weighty Matters.

Two amusing posts that are well worth a read:

• Dumbjon on 'fat activists' trying to claim the mantle of victimhood over their depiction in the new Pixar movie 'Wall-E'.
• Alas the starving are also a major problem in Western society, so Tizona helpfully highlights a NPR story of the plight of ordinary Americans unable to afford to buy food for themselves in Bush's America. Helpfully the NPR website includes photos of the emaciated dears.
  

On an unrelated subject could the owner of this cat come forwards.

Food Summits.

The global food crisis, I call it a crisis but for most countries it is simply an inconvenience, is likely to resolve itself in the next couple of years as higher prices make it more economically viable for farmers in developing countries to invest in more efficient farming practices. In politics however the motto is "Something must be done, this is something let's do it!".

Politicians don't like admitting that there is bugger all that they can do and the problem will sort itself out without help from them. Hence the ever growing number of 'food summits' that have been called by the UK, South Africa, Latin America and of course the masters of pointless showboating the UN. As an aside I see that Israel is disgusted at the presence of Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmanotgonnabothertospellhisnameright, despite the fact that he is the only major leader willing to push for a very sudden drop in demand for food, kosher food in particular.

I'm just impressed that the UN didn't get Zimbabwe to host the conference. The general consensus of these meetings of the finest minds of our lifetime is that we should really produce more food if we don't want to have a shortage of food.

Cabbage Theology

Many centuries ago their were a series of bitterly fought theological battles about the precise nature of Jesus and whether he was of the same divine substance as God or whether he was human.

In this secular age we have bitterly fought battles of the nature of cabbage and whether it is of the same garden substance as grass cuttings or whether it becomes something different when in enters a kitchen:

Retired milkman Barry Freezer made the mistake of dumping cabbage stalks in his bin and incurred the wrath of the council's waste collection supremos.

He says they treated him like a criminal and refused to collect his garden waste, claiming the cabbage trimmings were kitchen rubbish.

No doubt some trinitarian solution will be found in which a cabbage has three simultaneous natures as a garden product, food and a council waste collection supremo.

Luvvie Scum.

Some idiot has made a film glorifying an IRA hunger striker, because obviously the first 465 IRA apologist movies weren't enough. The deeply stupid producer Leni Jan Younghusband pompously declares:

"We think it is an awful situation in Guantanamo but we had exactly the same situation here. Let's remember we were doing this before Guantanamo. The film asks so many questions, including, 'What is the point of this kind of incarceration?'."

Yeah what is the point of incarcerating a member of a death squad who had been caught possessing weapons, I can't think. Even if you take the risible claims of the terrorists themselves, then the greatest indignity they suffered was being treated as what they were, criminals. Now personally I suspect much of the complaints about Guantanamo Bay are hyped up, but I doubt that Younghusband is making that point. Not intentionally anyway.

Naturally this piece of propaganda for a member of a fascistic terrorist group is being funded by Britain (the publicly owned Channel 4), does any other country do this?

There is an especially self loathing side to a large part of the British establishment, they despise this country and glorify it's enemies (yet are all too willing to suck up subsidies, greed outweighs the self loathing). It is probably a form of projection, they hate us because they hate themselves, but couldn't they learn from Max Moseley about how to channel those feelings in private instead of making a very unedifying spectacle of themselves in public?

{ Via David Vance at ATW, who is as unimpressed as I am}

Update: In the comments 'db' points out that the film is being promoted by the British Council.