Wednesday 25/03/09

I think I’ve been had. That bloody New Smoke freebie hasn’t turned up yet, not that I was 100% certain it would. If I don’t receive it in the next 24 hours, then the advert over on the right is going to be defaced.

Yesterday I was reading about a new deal for gas between the Ukraine and the EU (as one does) and spotted a photo of Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. I’m now going to show how shallow I am. My God – she’s a babe! Kind of puts Anne Widdecombe and Harriett Harman well into the shade. She has been dubbed one of the most beautiful women ever to enter politics. She also has one of the most sophisticated personal websites I have ever seen for a politician.

Here’s a wallpaper from her website of her on a motorbike. Not bad for 48, is she?


And another of her as an earth goddess. I’ve suddenly become religious!


She’s got my vote and I want to become Ukrainian.

Mentioned her to Hay last night and she started harrumphing all over the caravan muttering about her probably having had a facelift and using loads of slap. Tymoshenko’s hair braids have become a bit of a trademark, but the burning question of the day is whether she’s a true blonde (there are images of her as a brunette). Her daughter Yevhenia married Sean Carr, shop owner and lead singer of totally unknown Leeds heavy metal group the Death Valley Screamers. I’ll bet Yulia was ecstatic over that bit of news.


Talking of hair, a new member joined my gang yesterday – one Gino. I finally tracked him down to a UK website specialising in something to do with laser lighting. You can see him here – 2nd slap-head down and 3rd most follically challenged of the group. Quite an amusing site, and the company looks fun to work for too (I wonder if they need a marketing expert). They need to look at their gallery page though (and one or two other pages), as it doesn’t work. The family name of Gino and his brother (who both started the company) is Malocca. Given the company is based in Hertfordshire they are obviously the Hertfordshire Maloccas and not the County Monaghan, County Louth, County Wexford or Leicestershire Maloccas.

Gino – if you want an ad here for your company, then speak out. Looks like there's going to be a sponsorship vacancy tomorrow.

China is reported to have blocked the YouTube video-sharing website because it has been carrying video of soldiers beating monks and other Tibetans. I didn’t need the Chinese government to do it for me - Firefox has blocked it since last week. Firefox keeps telling me I have the wrong version of Flash and then when I follow the instructions it’s still totally non-responsive. I’m led to believe that it’s a compatibility problem between Mozilla and Google/YouTube which neither company seems willing to fix. Perhaps someone techknowledgeable will illuminate me – and not with a laser.

It seems old Cornish habits die hard. Three British divers from Cornwall being tried in Spain have admitted stealing treasure from a shipwreck in the Atlantic Ocean in 2002. They were recovering tin ingots from the wreck of a Dutch vessel, but strayed onto another Spanish wreck.

There’s a small town in Nebraska called McCook where the residents want to take possession of the state’s redundant electric chair and turn it onto a tourist attraction. The chair has apparently been used to terminate some 15 people in its illustrious career. I find the whole thing quite shocking.

School caterers in the UK say nutritional guidelines designed to make England's secondary school meals healthier are restrictive and cannot work. The complaint is that the guidelines restrict choice because designing school menus would be too time consuming, with the result that pupils will simply reject school food and buy lunch on the high street. Why is there this obsession with choice? When I was at school we had a choice – eat it or bring a packed lunch. At boarding school there was even less choice – eat it or go hungry. And when was the last time you saw a school within spitting distance of a high street? I suspect the real reason they don’t want to give kids healthy meals is because cooking them consumes more time (and hence expense) than mass produced frozen chips, burgers and pizzas. They may even have to hire cooks, rather than microwave operatives.

One of my customer complaints yesterday came from Kapgaf, who said he (I say he, as jokes about farts and admissions of having the attention span of a gnat seem to point in that general direction) was raised near The Towans in Cornwall, where Hay and I spent the weekend. On the road to Hayle from The Towans is a pub called The Bucket of Blood, and I’m intrigued how it got its name. I suspect some biblical reference, but would be grateful of any enlightenment from students of pub names. It’s one of those pubs where you walk in and all the conversation suddenly dries up and everyone stares at you. Sent shivers down my spine and there was something of The Whicker Man about the place.