Shakespearian Dictator Protected Origin

Chairman Appalled by Star Trek Acting Standards

Having watched the final series of Deep Space Nine over the last few months on CBS Action, Chairman Bill is appalled at the standard of acting in the current re-run of Star Trek – the Original Series.

The acting is sufficiently wooden to be made of well-seasoned, air-dried oak and the special effects / scenery make Crossroads look positively Hollywoodian by comparison.

Chairman Bill is convinced that, following the debut of Sir Patrick Stewart in The Next Generation, all sci-fi actors should in future be RSC trained.

When interviewed, Chairman Bill said: “How did we ever put up with it in the 60s?”


Another Middle East Dictator Threatens Himself

Bashar al-Assad, President of Syria, has vowed to bring to justice those dastardly people who want democracy and to overturn his beautifully crafted police state paradise.

The people of Deraa will "eliminate whoever is behind the violence", the Syrian leader said. Well, given he’s the one who first started shooting peaceful protesters, he can only be talking about himself.


Point of Designated Origin – Again

Last night Chairman Bill was watching a TV programme called The Great British Food Revival.

Some Brummie chef was waxing lyrical about English cheeses and how we should be supporting British cheese producers through the PDO system and eschewing foreign imitation muck.

He then went on to praise a plethora of British camemberts, ricottas and parmesans, which the Chairman thought the height of hypocrisy.

The Chairman said: “Let the market decide - allow regionally named cheeses to be made anywhere in the world and simply put the country of origin on the packet in large lettering. PoD does not signify quality in any way, shape or form; it’s merely protectionism in its lowest manifestation.”

Chairman Bill Goes it Alone

Yesterday Chairman Bill went to London to see a man and a woman in a large company he last worked for some 11 years ago. The subject under discussion was a 6 month consultancy assignment, which might extend to a year.

On the basis of this opportunity, The Chairman has decided to set out on his own.

There’s many a slip betwixt cup and lip, but you have to make a decision at some stage in your life as to what you really want from it all.

Executions with Crossed Fingers

Overheard in the Caravan:

Chairman: “What’s that ming of burn in the loo?”

Hay: “A snuffed out candle – best air freshener in the world.”

Chairman: “I thought Kitty had taken her flints into the straw under the caravan and had lit her mouse BBQ.”


Cameron to Redress Decline in Executions

According to Amnesty International, the number of executions world-wide has suffered an inexplicable decline.

David Cameron has pledged, with Nick Clegg’s approval, to address this deplorable state of affairs by forcing through a law to execute the 149 people accused over the unrest in London on Saturday, which followed an anti-spending cuts march.

It is not thought many would object.


NATO Secretary General Crosses Fingers While Making Statement

The secretary general of NATO has insisted that it is "impartial" and coalition forces in Libya will not arm the rebels to attack Col Gaddafi.

Our correspondents suspect he had his finger crossed when he said that.

Crossed fingers, as every schoolchild knows, bestow legal immunity from the consequences of anything said while the fingers are crossed – at least that’s what the world (except for the Russians) hopes.

Decimal Crowd Control at the Yacht Club

Japanese Confused Over Decimal Point

Following the Fukushima Daiichi power company saying the radiation at one of its damaged plants is 10 million times normal, and then saying it was a mistake, pundits suggest that the company has a problem with the concept of the decimal point.

35 minutes past 10 million o’clock?

British Police to Consider Use of Snipers

After anarchists hi-jacked Saturday’s 250,000 strong peaceful London protest over government cuts (interpreted by Gaddafi's propaganda machine as a pro-Gaddafi rally), British police are now considering replacing the controversial kettling system of crowd containment with the Gaddafi-influenced use of snipers on tall buildings to take out masked protesters who are clearly out to cause nothing but vandalism.

Innovative crowd control method?

Chairman Bill Joins Yacht Club with No Boats

Chairman Bill, intrepid sailor and master mariner, has joined the Chipping Sodbury Yacht Club, one of the very few inland yacht clubs where it is mandatory that members do not own a vessel of any description.

He urges readers to have a look at the website, which is somewhat amusing and cocks a snook at some of the more up-your-arse and ridiculous rules that regular yacht clubs have.

Not allowed.

Paleolithic Design & Technology

Overheard in the Caravan:

Hay: “Have you put something in your hair?”

Chairman: “Mmm, some of that serum you have in your cupboard for fly-away hair. The Barnett won't do as it's told today.”

Hay: “How much did you put in?”

Chairman: “2 squirts.”

Hay: “Far too much – makes your hair look greasy.”

Chairman: “You mean like Bryan Ferry?”

Hay: “More like Mersey Ferry. I think you have reverse body dysmorphia; when you look in a mirror you see Johnny Depp - when I look at you in a mirror I see John Prescott.”


Flint Knapping Passé, Says Ofsted

Ofsted has criticised Design & Technology teaching in British schools, saying that flint knapping and fire making were excised from the continental curriculum about 5,000 years ago.

While children in France and Germany are being taught robotics and Computer Aided Design, the UK’s children are still being instructed to make wobbly wheels and hideously misshapen clay jugs fit only for decorating their grandparents’ living rooms.

Chairman Bill, a D&T teacher from Old Sodbury with a master’s degree in Palaeolithic hand axe design, said: “You never know when you’re going to need a good stone axe or a flint arrowhead to kill a sabre-toothed tiger.”

What my son brought home from his D&T class.

Identity Isues for Gaddafi Asylum in UK

Arab League Has Identity Issues

The Arab League is in a bit of a quandary.

The organisation has 22 member states – 21 since Libya’s membership was suspended.

Only 2 of the member nations have made it to the list of top 100 democracies, and one of those is Palestine, which isn’t even recognised internationally as a state. That leaves just Lebanon.

The remaining states are having their own problems regarding the enforcement of authoritarian rule and some Arab League countries are actively engaged in Libya-style repression of popular democratic uprisings, or even assisting in the repression of same in a neighbouring member state.

Can anything the Arab League says be representative of the views of the average Arab on the street who is being shot at by his government while exiting the mosque on the way to catching the Clapham omnibus?

Clapham omnibus.

Gaddafi Should be Offered Asylum in UK, Says Chairman Bill

Chairman Bill has astonished both the military and financial worlds by suggesting Muammar Gaddafi could be offered asylum in the UK in return for say £20bn of his ill-gotten gains.

This would solve the Libyan crisis, offset a part of the UK's significant national debt, boost UK jobs and inject some much needed liquidity into the moribund housing market.

Analysts have suggested Bill be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, as well and the Nobel Prize for Economics and the Wimpey Prize for Palace Building.

Chairman Bill commented: "Gaddafi would only be the start - if we offered asylum to every tin pot dictator in the world we'd soon have the deficit fully under control. The government could also capitalise on them by renting them out for opening church fetes and the like.

"As it stands, places like Saudi and Venezuela benefit from dictator immigration. We need to change this and offer a complete service; removal and asylum - a complete package deal."

Strategic Sutee on Mothers' Day

Everyone Now a Military Strategist

Since hearing military types throw around phrases like ‘lack of clear objectives’ and ‘strategic intent’, British dinner party talk has shifted from how much everyone’s house is worth and the disproportionate cost of boarding school fees toward the nature of the balance-of-power mechanism and the asymmetrical relationship between attack and defence. This is usually followed by a quick game of Call of Duty (Black Ops Libya) on their kids’ PS3s.

Armed with their new arm-chair strategy skills gained from 24 hour news channels, millions of middle class office drones are busy buying up Amazon’s stock of Carl von Clausewitz’s seminal book, ‘On War’ and casually dropping sentences like; “War is not merely a political act, but also a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means,” into canteen conversations and hoping to sound very clever.

A clear trend has also been seen in marketing departments cornering the trade in redundant generals in order to ‘strike fear into the enemies’ hearts’ and ‘win the hearts and minds of customers’ through ‘surgical strikes in the field’.

It their battle with the government cuts, the NHS and BMA in particular are showing an unhealthy interest in the latter phrase of ‘surgical strikes in the field’.

Chairman Bill, armchair military strategist, raconteur and market gardening expert said: “I wouldn’t bother spending all this money on no-fly zones – just put a £10m price on Gaddafi’s head, dead or alive, and have him topped by a bodyguard. That’s got to be lower than the cost of a dozen missiles or keeping several hundred planes in the air for months on end. Turning Tripoli into an organic butternut squash farm would be prohibitive in fertilizer cost alone.”

He continued: “I learnt that from Sun Tzu – kill one butternut squash, terrify a thousand.”


Meanwhile, secretaries and PR account executives all over Britain are putting forward coherent and well-reasoned strategic analyses of why the Libyan rebels should be left to be slaughtered by Gaddafi while they are desperately crying out to the West for help in dealing with a vicious dictator lacking any public mandate.


UK Democracy Protesters Hope British Army Will Support Them

With the upcoming referendum on a change to the voting system, the British public is wondering whether it will get support from the British Army for UK regime change, like the protesters in Egypt did.

Defence analysts suggest there may be an initial bit of fence-sitting on the part of the British generals, but eventually they will come over to the demonstrators’ view, especially if the public allow them to build a massive army and both the Navy and RAF are given permission to go after Gaddafi with a few very expensive ships and shiny new high-tech bombers.

Chairman Bill assures us that he has family in London and they all want Cameron out, despite Cameron’s use of human shields. Chairman Bill commented: “The human shields are actually Cameron’s LibDem bodyguards, and no-one gives a toss about them anymore, so take them out.”

The first action required by the Democracy Protesters will be the imposition of a No-Bullshit Zone over London, for which they could appeal to Col. Gaddafi’s propaganda machine.


Incinerate Your Mother on Mothers’ Day

Seen in the window of a Chipping Sodbury beautician.

Perhaps more suited to the quaint Indian funeral rite of sutee (or widow burning), but if you must immolate your mother in paraffin, ensure she catches light the first time or else it can be very messy, not to say expensive.

Fiscal Windfall on Protected Designated Origin

A happy birthday to our founder - Chairman Bill.

Calls for Government Windfall Tax

Following allegations of the government profiteering from its programme of cuts, there have been calls for the government to subject itself to a windfall tax on its £8bn windfall.


Institute for Fiscal Studies and BBC State the Obvious

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) and the BBC have published a report which suggests that the old and the poor are worst hit by the recession.

They may just as well have produced a report stating that 1+1=2.


PDO

Chairman Bill thinks he’s found a sensible solution to the vexed question of Protected Designated Origin that has been taxing him of late.

Bill says that all produce having a location in its name should have the actual location of manufacture and the true place of origin of whatever goes into it placed conspicuously on the packaging in letters twice the size of the location name it goes under.

Thus Cumberland sausage may be made anywhere, but the fact it was made in Grozny from pork sourced in Gdansk will be displayed in huge lettering. Similarly Genuine Glasgow Tikka Marsala could be made in Madras, if a market could be found for it in India.

Chairman Bill said: “That way we facilitate competition, reduced carbon wotsits and increased consumer choice, not to say evolution of the product to possibly a higher or alternative standard to suit regional taste.”

Cheddar Gorge, Orkney

Orcadians Take the Piss Over Cheddar Cheese

Orkney Island Cheddar is made using milk from the Orkney Isles, ‘following a traditional recipe and process’. The makers are seeking another one of these damned ridiculous protected name status thingummies.

Chairman Bill has never even heard of this cheese and the ‘traditional process’ mentioned originates from Cheddar in Somerset. Rather than going for name protection, the makers of Orkney Island Cheddar should be prosecuted under EU legislation for misappropriating the Cheddar name.

Why would anyone other than an Orcadian even want to buy, let alone make an Orkney Island cheddar? I would imagine that outside of Orkney it would have all the allure of genuine imitation plastic.

When will someone take these Eurocrats by the neck, give them a damned good slapping and stop all this nonsense?



Here's a question for you - when does a human shield become a bodyguard?

Crusader CT Scans for David Icke

Gaddafi ‘a Bit Confused’

Gaddafi accuses the Libyan rebels of being Al Qaeda while simultaneously asking his adoring public to believe these supposed Al Qaeda rebels are in an unholy alliance with what Gaddafi calls ‘crusaders’. Make up your mind, Muammar.

Following the air strikes by the Alliance, Walid Madjdali, a computer engineer, said: “We want to die for our President. We will stay here [in Gaddafi’s compound] all night. Even three or four nights if we have to.”

One wonders why Walid won’t spend a 5th night there. Presumably it’s because that’s when he expects someone to come gunning for Gaddafi and he doesn’t want to be around when that happens.


Official, a Few Americans are Congenitally and Irretrievably Stupid

Americans, panicked into thinking that radiation from Japan is about to hit them, are buying up stocks of iodine tablets, gas masks and pet shelters.

In the USA you can pay $160 and get a whole-body CT scan as part of a medical check-up. That can deliver a radiation dose equivalent to being 1.5 miles from the centre of the 1945 Hiroshima atom bomb explosion.

Americans undergo 70 million CT scans each year (up from 3 million in the 80s), most of them totally needless and done purely to protect doctors from law suits in case they miss something with an X-ray. The US National Cancer Institute has estimated that 29,000 Americans will get cancer as a result of the CT scans they received in 2007 alone.

Why then are they worrying about radiation from a small leak from all the way across the other side of the Pacific Ocean when they don’t give a second thought to the consequences of all these CT scans?


“Who Funds David Icke,” Asks Chairman Bill

Well, who does? And for that matter, who the hell attends his speeches? Someone must.