Grombles

Over 18 minutes of the 80 minute international between Wales and Scotland this year was taken up by scrums. There were probably only a dozen or so of them, but they kept breaking down and having to be reset. In monetary terms, a ticket costs £80 - that's £18 per person x 80,000 at Twickenham = about £1.5m that rugby fans paid the RFU to watch failed scrums in that match - and that doesn't include Sky subscriptions etc. Unfortunately this has become a regular feature of the professional game, and is exceptionally boring for spectators. Unfortunately it's also impossible for most people, other than perhaps the front row of the packs, but certainly including the referee and touch judges, to know what is going wrong. Generally the referee will get bored and award a random penalty to one side or the other in the hope that it will 'encourage les autres' and show he means business. This might then result in a team gaining 3 points for fictitious reasons with a 50% probabil...

They say one of the secrets of a good marriage is never being bored by your partner. During the course of our marriage I have been collecting what are largely a series of my wife's mixed metaphors which might normally slip by unnoticed, but which for some reason, don't quite sound right. After a double take I realise their genius and jot them down. Some are not mixed metaphors but actually malapropisms, spoonerisms, or delightful figures of speech all of their own. The joy is that her mind works so fast, she finds and combines two figures of speech in the time most of us might struggle for one. But the best talent of all is to throw caution to the wind and launch them into the world whether they have ever been uttered before or not - and especially whether they are physically possible or not. The result is a magical combination of ideas that are far more evocative than either of the original sayings, as well as being more meaningful and infinitely more colourful than the under...

If you've got an iJobs, you've got to use iTunes. He's a genius, and we're all twats for buying his stuff and ensuring we're stuck with his software bollocks that now controls our lives. In particular iTunes (and all the IOS crap his ghost infects our 'soon-to-be-bricks' with). Now iTunes does a couple of things fairly well (although there are no doubt vast numbers of examples out there that do all of these infinitely better, but I'm too busy writing stuff no-one reads to waste my life investigating them). iTunes enables you get stuff you know exists. And it automatically updates stuff you want to be kept updated, like podcasts (we used to call them recordings) and app releases. What it is truly shit at doing is helping you find an app that does something you need. It could be so much better if it took a leaf or two out of Amazon or Ebay's books. But in iTunes there's virtually no index. The closest you can get down to is this: and then...

I'm going to cry. No really. I'm going to cry. My iPhone won't sync the notes I write on it with Outlook. After hours of forums and fiddling, I've discovered that some spotty software developer at Apple has decided that notes written on an iPhone go into an email account (why??!), which some other spotty-faced developer at Google (and I have great sympathy with all acne sufferers, but god knew what he was doing afflicting these bastards) decided should be in my Gmail account (it's an email address, not a folder to keep stuff), and which some spotty-face at Microsoft decided wouldn't show up without crashing Outlook on my incredibly slow and totally knackered Dell, designed by.... some other spotty-faced nutter. I'm a graduate engineer from UCL (lord knows how) and regard myself as technically literate. I read New Scientist, BBC Focus (fantastic mag!), watch endless science and tech documentaries, and am a member of the Royal Institution. I founded a number...

Today I received this viral email. I apologise for reproducing it in full, but there are so many issues contained in it, that you do need to read the whole thing. After you've read it I will argue that this sort of anti-Islamic vitriol is precisely why there was a holocaust in the first place. Read and be very afraid. Europe Died at Auschwitz .. The following is a copy of an article written by Spanish writer Sebastian Vilar Rodriguez and published in a Spanish newspaper on Jan. 15, 2008. It doesn't take much imagination to extrapolate the message to the rest of Europe - and possibly to the rest of the world. REMEMBER AS YOU READ -- IT WAS WRITTEN IN A SPANISH NEWSPAPER Date: Tue. 15 January 2008 ALL EUROPEAN LIFE DIED IN AUSCHWITZ....... By Sebastian Vilar Rodrigez I walked down the street in Barcelona , and suddenly discovered a terrible truth - Europe died in Auschwitz ... We killed six million Jews and replaced them with 20 million Muslims. In Auschwitz we burned a culture...

My previous post about why a mansion tax would not only be wrong but impractical, seems to have persuaded most of the government together with all sensibly-minded folk, but not, apparently, the unconvinced Vince. From the Guardian today: Cable did not rule out new, higher council tax bands on multimillion-pound properties. "There are vast numbers of extraordinarily valuable properties now around the south of England netting very large gains for their owners – many of whom come from abroad, incidentally – and it's not taxed at all," he said. "Basically, you get people with multimillion-pound properties paying exactly the same council tax as somebody in a three-bedroom semi. So the system doesn't work." What does he mean " netting very large gains for their owners"? Is he under a delusion that by sitting in an expensive property people are somehow making money from it? Quite apart from the obvious point that a bigger property costs more to run (m...