Multi Tasking

Overheard in the Loos.

The Chairman is having a pee in the loo of the New Inn, Tresco while simultaneously answering an email on his smartphone.

Chap also having a pee; "And they say only women can mult-task! Absolute rubbish!"

Scilly Scenes

It's like Cornwall, but better - and without the crowds of people.

Have you noticed how conservative American femal politicians have that 1980s, Stepford Wives, Dynasty, Barbie look about them. Lacquered hair and structure suits, looking as if they've just stepped out of a board room. Hideous!

I'm desperate to hear the news headline; "Apple and Blackberry crumble."

Scilly Scillies

We set off for Penzance at 4.45 yesterday, leaving some 45 minutes as a fudge factor. What we didn't expect was for the M5 to be closed after junction 26 due to an overturned boat and to spend an hour in a traffic jam.

Having been directed back up the southbound carriageway for some 2 miles, we finally got back on the M5 after junction 27 and made the ferry to the Scillies with 2 minutes to spare, throwing the car keys into the hands of the parking attendant on the quay.

The Scillies are, however, quite idyllic - well, St Agnes is. I am led to believe some of the islands are a bit Yummy Mummy.

Went for a walk around the island of St Agnes yesterday and was intrigued by miles and miles of beautifully crafted walls made of cobbles, whose sole function appear to be to keep the bracken fields separate from the gorse fields.

Obviously someone must be making a fortune from growing bracken and gorse in order to be able to afford such expensive walls.

The Real Reason for the Riots

I've got it sussed - forget about all the explanations coming from the social scientists, the politicians, the police. As far as I'm concerned, the rot set in with the industrial revolution and the mass migration of peasants from the land to conurbations. Urbanisation was bound to lead to trouble. Cities should be dismantled and the inhabitants encouraged to live in communities of no larger than a couple of hundred, where everyone knows everyone else and recidivism means intolerable social stigmatisation and an embarrassing spell in the stocks.

Hang on - that means city chavs moving into the shires. Can't have that! Wall up the cities and keep them all inside - including the bent politicians, the corrupt police and rapacious bankers!

I've now got another theory; unemployed young men are being denied their basic instinct to be hunters (i.e. productive workers 'bringing home the bacon'). Looting provides an outlet for the primeval hunting instinct - albeit a socially unacceptable outlet.

Well, it's about as good as any other theory. I'm somewhere on the M5 or A30 now, so I don't really care. What's your pet theory?

Riots & Uniforms

I must say I do detest all the political posturing and sound-bites from MPs who feel they have to be seen to inspect the damage and photographed with a broom, as if that's going to do a jot of good. I'd rather they were sat behind their desks giving power to those on the ground and have their spokespeople liaise with the media instead.

I was incensed listening to one yob blaming the riots on Poles coming in and 'taking our jobs'. How on earth can someone 'take' jobs from people? The only reason the Poles get the jobs is because many Brits simply don't want to do them in the first place, or can't because they're illiterate! This ill-informed misconception of foreigners coming over to 'take jobs' is nonetheless popular among the illiterati - and a very dangerous one that the far right and the Daily Mail peddle to their advantage.

My recent spell of unemployment demonstrated to me that there are plenty of jobs out there if you're willing to work for the minimum wage. Sadly, there is little incentive when you're being paid benefits by a faceless bureaucracy for sitting at home and doing nothing. However, I can quite understand that attitude, but it is totally selfish and demonstrates a deep lack of respect for the society that hands out the money.

Hay is convinced that rioting is caused by an incessant diet of chips and junk food - plays havoc with the hormones apparently.

The boy was out most of yesterday, which was a pleasant change from sitting in a darkened room playing with his PS3. I was part expecting him to return after dark with a new pair of trainers and some unexplained luxury electronics, but it was not to be.

I'm still not sure about the riot police uniforms. I still prefer the Empire Storm Trooper jobs; they're a tad more intimidating, if somewhat impractical in a close-quarters situation with a Jedi. Perhaps Viv Westwood should be brought in to add a touch of glamour? The policeman in the photo below is just asking for his nads to be kicked, if you ask me - no protection at all!

An Imperial storm trooper (left) and a British riot policeman (right)

Posting will once more be sporadic after today - if at all. We're off to the Scilly Isles for a week, St Agnes, to be precise. No broadband and very little GSM.

I have loaded the HTC Sensation with a variety of e-books to keep me occupied - The Borgias (must catch the TV series with Jeremy Irons on Saturday evening), Meditations, The Antiquities of the Jews, Dracula, Ivanhoe, The Age of Reason, &c - all the stuff I've been meaning to read (or re-read) for ages, but never got round to.

The boy is off to stay with his grandparents in Latvia for two weeks - flying on his own for the first time, so that will be an adventure for him. I will probably have to control him remotely via GSM from Gatwick airport car park to ensure he finds the right gate.

Riot Solution & iPhones

Hay has come up with a solution to the looting; snipers placed at strategic points on rooftops. All it would take would be one or two 'casualties'.

She also wants to picket Apple, as she's just discovered that you can't send a photo with MMS using the iPhone. Have you ever heard something so damned ridiculous? Not only was the iPhone 4 incapable of making a call when launched, you can't even send a picture message with one. Piece of junk!

A friend of mine was caught up in the rioting in Liverpool. He dodged into a Job Centre to hide and breathed a sigh of relief - the rioters would never enter there.

Google Getting a Bit Too Clever

I'm seriously considering switching to Yahoo as my search engine as Google just seems to be getting a bit too clever for its own good.

Rather than just a the plain old search results of yore, I'm now getting rather a lot of sponsored adverts and links to things I'm simply not interested in. If I do a Google search, I invariably have to page down to get anything even remotely pertinent. It even gives me results for searches it thinks I meant to make, rather than searches I actually made; I do not like being told I'm wrong by a bloody search engine.

Pressing the down cursor key no longer simply scrolls the page - it now steps from item to item, loading reams of spurious data, along with information about whether the page is safe. On some image pages the page-down key goes so far and then no further, despite there being more to show.

I used to request 100 search items in a page; now, no matter what I set as the default, it's limited to about 10 items.

No - in its attempt to be more relevant, it has moved into the realm of total irrelevance. Give me back my old Google!

As for the rioters - give them an enforced diet of opera and Shakespeare. Talk about Clockwork Orange! Mindless violence it might be, but it is the direct result of alienation and marginalisation. Will Cameron do a Bashir Assad on them?

Dangerous School Trips

"...and Horatio was eaten by a polar bear."

Sounds like something from a children's book, doesn't it?

Dangerous school trips where pupils stand only a 90% chance of returning alive may become the new black for the middle classes; parents will vie with each other to get their kids eaten by the fiercest carnivores.

"Ptolemy was eaten by a lion in Africa!"

"Well, Ignatius was devoured by a wolf in the Caucasus!"

It certainly beats the usual litigious brigade suing the school because their kid slipped on a banana skin or got a mosquito bite on the school outing.

Entertainment from the Past

Wonderful technology

I'm just trying out the new android app for blogger, using speech to text as well.