There ain't half been some clever bastards...

When I'm in the UK, I seem to have this mantra.

"Stupid bloody Poms. Stupid bloody Poms. Stupid bloody Poms"

You're constantly encountering dumb rules, imbecilic shop assistants, officious civil servants, illegible signs and basic, grinding thickness.

But sometimes, you think "There ain't half been some clever bastards"

(Ian Dury thought so, too.)

Take the Oyster system for public transport in London.

Buy the card, load it up and wave it over the sensor when you enter and leave an Underground station or bus.

Deducts the fare from the card, works out the cheapest fare or combination during any travel day and caps it at that charge.

Contactless. Simple. Brilliant.

Go shopping at M & S and use the self-service checkout.

Quick as a flash, good ergonomic layout, pay with credit card within seconds.

I'd say - conservatively - that it's twice as fast as the ones I use in Germany

Ain't half been some clever bastards.....

Mixed with yellow Chinkees....

London.
1969.

Ah, what blissfully innocent times they were....

You could write lyrics like

Curly Latin kinkies
Mixed with yellow Chinkees

and no-one would bat an eyelid.

(Well, they wouldn't, would they? This is the culture that gave us "The Life of Brian"...)

These days, you'd have the ACLU, the Teachers' Union and every bastard and his brother (oops, sibling - don't want to get flamed for sexism) ranting and raving.

And then

Rabbis and the friars
Vishnus and the gurus
We got the Beatles or the Sun God
Well, it really doesn't matter what religion you choose

The Beatles? A religion?!

That'll do to bring on the Vatican and loony Religious Right, burning records and putting hexes on everyone involved.

Blue Mink.

"Melting Pot"

You take some session musicians, a song writing team responsible (yes, RESPONSIBLE, as in "responsible for war crimes ") for "I'd like to teach the world to sing", some flippant, warm fuzzies lyrics and end up at No 3 in the charts and stay in the Top 10 for months.

And what a pedigree the band had:

Madeleine Bell: Went to the UK as a performer in "Black Nativity", session singer with Dusty Springfield, Cliff Richard, Tom Jones, Scott Walker, Long John Baldry, Joe Cocker, Elton John....

Roger Cook: Half of "David and Jonathon" (""Michelle" cover? No? OK...), half of Cook-Greenaway with hit after hit after hit, the only British songwiter to be inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.

Herbie Flowers: Bass line on Lou Reed's "Walk on the wild side", Bowie's "Space Oddity" and Harry Nilson's "Jump into the fire" (although this is Robin Zander's version), member of Alexis Korner's CCS and T. Rex.

Alan Parker: Guitar on Donovan's "Hurdygurdy Man"

If you lump it all together
Well, you've got a recipe for a get-along scene

As the song goes

It's got all the right hooks, chord changes, bridges, base lines, off-the-beat drum stuff, swelling organ.(Eh?...)

Formula pop.

Never been done better.

Blogging - A Definition

People with nothing to say writing for people with nothing to do

Blokes and sheds

For those of you who may not be fully aware of what we do:

• We go to someone’s shed, about once a month, about 7pm
  
  
• The bloke shows us what’s in his shed, or what he’s done; doing, or wants to do
  
  
• We decide whose shed we visit next month
  
  
• We go home about 9pm.

From the Mapua Coastal News.

I think we're moving to the right kind of place...

I'm very sorry about this... #5

Make mine a double

Most countries have laws to protect littlies against the the double demons of alcohol and nicotine.

(Some places even go to the other extreme, but that's another story...)

Ursula von der Leyen, Germany's Family Minister (and - with 7 kids - eminently well qualified for the job) came up with a useful policing idea.

By the media and political reaction, it also appears to be quite novel, in that no-one in the past appears to have thought to find out how kids are getting the stuff, but anyway..)

You recruit kids who are marginally under the legal age for purchasing fags and booze, team them up with a grown-up (who lurks about in the background with the handcuffs) and send them out to see if retail outlets are IDing adequately.

Bloody hell!

You would have thought she was sending them off to child slavery or into the clutches of the neighbourhood paedophile.

"Outrageous! Corrupting our children!" Wuggawugga. Rant Rant

So the chattering classes all agreed it wasn't a good idea, Ursula took the idea back to the drawing board and things have quietened down.

I see an opportunity here.

I have a bit of time on my hands and I wouldn't mind drifting around, trying to buy alcohol and cigarettes and seeing if I get IDed.

Might even get some free samples.

So I shall be applying to Ursula for one of these unfilled jobs.

If they turn me down, I'll sue on the grounds of age discrimination.

Tags: ursula von der leyen, alcohol, tobacco

Hype

All this organic crap is started to get on my tits.

New organic supermarket opened in town the other day and it's all very nice and shiny and they have organic cosmetics and pencils made from happy trees, but I really don't think that the organic chantarelles have to be dried out, mouldy and generally shitty-looking and no, I don't believe you when you say that the ginger from China you're charging a premium for is organic.

I don't believe that ANYTHING from China is organic.

I can't prove this, but I think it's your job to demonstrate to me that you're serious.

Organic fucking pencils....

It's even worse in the UK.

I have before me a packet of Organic Milk Chocolate & Toffee from Marks and Spencer.

It says "These sophisticated (Realspeak: expensive) biscuits have been specially baked for us (Realspeak:We have a contract with the bakery) by a Scottish (Realspeak: benefiting from the EU structural subsidies) firm still owned and managed by the founding family (Realspeak: set up in 2006 and privately owned by a venture capitalist), by the banks of the Spey river (Realspeak: cost-effective effluent management.)

Looking closely at the ingredients, I learn that everything's organic except those asterisked, "indicating permitted non-organic ingredients of non-agricultural origins.

There are a lot of asterisks.

And please don't ask me to believe that palm oil is organic.

Grant me that much intelligence.

Please.

One swallow does not a summer make

Dear Mr Fyfe,

I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but you'll probably have to sack me for what I did.
One of our high value customers, Damian Christie from TVNZ, left his mobile in the Koru Lounge here.
I know that I'm supposed to tell customers that they're responsible for arranging collection and so on if they're stupid enough to forget their phones, but I didn't.
I gave the phone to one of the crew on the next flight to Wellington who got it to Damian in time for the weekend.
I know I wasn't meant to do it, but we thought it was the right thing to do.
We figured that if it was you in Damian's position, you'd like to find someone who'd bend the rules for you.

Raewyn B


Wouldn't Rob Fyfe, Air New Zealand's CEO, just love to get a letter like that, instead of having to read Damian's rant over at Cracker.

And why is it like this?

Because modern businesses bleed the initiative out of even the most motivated employee.

Before I became rich, influential, famous and chronologically gifted (well, chronologically gifted...), I worked for Lufthansa Cargo in Special Handling.
Years later, I was sitting around one day, chewing the fat with Rainer Butz, one of the guys on the Executive Board, and he said "Whatever happened to the characters in the company? Where are the new legends? It's just so boring these days"
I said "Well, we've succeeded in regulating them out of the system"
He looked, but he didn't say anything.

It was our job back then to shortcircuit the processes and procedures that Lufthansa Cargo had in place, because - designed by people who were totally out of touch with reality - they were simply too unwieldy and slow and didn't meet the needs of our customers - all 8 of them - who generated 80% of the revenue at the hub.
Normal cutoff time for a flight was 5 hours. We'd regularly do in 2.
30 minutes at a pinch.
If need be, we'd drive forklifts, build up and recontour pallets , crawl around in aircraft bellies, play tarmac jockey (it's actually "ramp rat", Damian...) and do dubious deals with Customs/Weight and Balance/Ops/Lufthansa Passenger Airline and anyone you needed to make things happen.
To say that we had a certain amount of leeway, along with loads of time sitting around, waiting for something to go wrong that needed fixing, would be an understatement

So would the saying "Idle hands are the devil's tools".
You'd have people calling up unsuspecting coworkers or customers, claiming to be Johnny Cash's manager with some outrageously unlikely request, or Captain Orr from the 5th Armoured Divison with a cat inbound from Dallas that was fatally allergic to anything but banana milk.
People would be sent on wild goose chases for exotic mushrooms, irate professors on the phone ranting about lost exam papers, TV magazines would be kept for a year - A YEAR - and then distributed to intense confusion and an Ops agent, stuck out on a remote position with a 707 freighter at 3 in the morning, would see his VW Beetle being towed up, all nicely tied down on a pallet with a tag for Bujumbura or Kinshasa. Or worse.
A lot of this nonsense was alcohol-fuelled, of course. We had a very nice slyglogging operation running on the side and the profits (which we'd consume in liquid form) aided creativity no end.

But we were the guys to call if we had a customer in deepest South America who needed medication unavailable locally for someone in his family.
We'd have a chat to the airport clinic who'd somehow get the stuff for us and we'd zip out to the evening flight and sweet-talk the crew into putting it in the fridge and then get one of the guys we knew down in wherever it was to met the aircraft and pick it up.

Some stuff went down in the history books, too.

There was an early cold snap in September 1974, stranding the migrating swallows north of the Alps, with no hope of survival. Local radio station talks to someone at Lufthansa who says "Sure we'll help" and hundreds HUNDREDS of people turn up with thousands THOUSANDS of fucking swallows in shoe boxes, cartons, cages, crates. Anything.
So we'd load up the van and cruise the flight lines, looking for any aircraft flying vaguely southwards.
No radios, no IT to speak of to find out which aircraft was going where. You'd zip up the steps, pop your head in the cockpit and say "Where are you you heading for? We've got some swallows" and more often than not, you'd get rid of a couple of hundred to Genoa or Rome or Marseilles.
The crews would do low stress "swallow" departures and approaches, we even had captains who'd take boxes in the cockpit or requisition the forward loo if there weren't any First Class passengers.
Moved a couple of 100,000 in a matter of weeks.
But gradually, the technocrats took over - humourless fucking bunch of wowsers - and you couldn't do this and you couldn't do that and PEOPLE kept getting SERIOUSLY TALKED to and slowly but surely PEOPLE were fucked if THEY were going to be TALKED to ALL the fucking time and CYA became the name of the game.

And if the weather suddenly turned cold this week, the swallows wouldn't get saved.

Think about it, Rob.

There's a need for rules, but you need to incite people to break stupid ones if need be.

And reward them

Hamburgers

A hamburger's not a hamburger if it doesn't have a slice of beetroot on it.

That's what I grew up with and it's valid to this day.

We were at the Boatshed in Nelson last year, watching the ever excellent Windy City Strugglers (who are back next Wednesday, btw) and got talking to a couple who had recently moved there.

"And if you want a REALLY good hamburger " he said "- with BEETROOT - you have to go to Roto Road Takeaways"

And off we did just go.

Bun, patty, lettuce, onion, ketchup, tomato, cheese, beetroot AND a fried egg.

See if you can put THAT to music, Jimmy.

We've taken to making our own.

Beef mince with loads of onions, parsley and paprika.
Feta sheep cubes in the middle.
Grill until medium-rare.
Brioche, mustard, lettuce, onion and - the discovery of the week - yellow beetroot.

Couldn't sneak the fried egg past the culinary police, though

And tonight, it's spaghetti with home-made tomato sauce and minced chicken.

I've christened it Spaghetti Pollonaise...

No?

No-one else got it, either

Strange, that....

WTF #2

The European Convention of the Republican Party in Mainz on Saturday. (More over at MDP)

800 of them vs 2000 right-minded citizens protesting their presence in the city

All very peaceful, as you'd expect - a well-structured police line to prevent the radical fringe from dishing out summary justice to the delegates and aRapid Reaction team, looking distinctly Darth Vader-ish, on hand just in case things got a bit hectic

Plus a few dressed-as-anarchists lads to provide the stroppiness factor.

It panned out exactly as Rupert Smith describes in his book The Utility of Force:

Act 1 Provocation

A couple of lads clamber up onto some very solid (as in steel-girder-solid) gazebos.


Act 2 Confrontation

Regular policeman (visibly annoyed) orders them down. (He did say "Please"...)
They ask why.
Regular policeman says pretty much "Because I say so".
Discussion ensues, police mediators turn up, chat, chat,chat.

Act 3 Conflict

Drag them down from the gazebos, handcuff them and wheel them away

Which is never going to happen and both parties know it.

In fact, the lads know that they've won (and they know how they can go next time) and the law knows they've lost, so they back off and prevent other people from clambering up for a better view (which is what they should have been doing in the first place in they didn't want a confrontation in the first place)


The Darth Vader mob (keeping a very low and professional profile) see that they won't be needed today, so they move off to a spot in the sun.

And this is where I stand around in gob-smacked mode.

They're moving around the periphery of the demonstration and suddenly these harmless looking little old ladies and their husbands, all covered with Peace buttons and what have you, rush over and stand in their way.

And when the Darth Vaders try and walk around them, they MOVE BACK INTO THEIR PATH to obstruct them again. And again.
All the time, their loopy mates are piping up with idiotic advice like "Don't do anything until they hit you, Helga"

And I'm thinking "WTF? They're not going to HIT them. What is the POINT of this? Just WHAT are they trying to ACHIEVE, for Christ's sake?"

Then the light goes on.

Back to Act 1......

Sleeping Beauty

Chappy round our way got done in a speed trap the other day.

Saw the flash - not unexpectedly, doing 47 in a 30kmh zone - and also saw the bloke in the unmarked police car.

Fast asleep.

Documented it, of course.

In due course, he gets the summons along the lines of "You were done for speeding on such-and-such at such-and-such location blah blah wugga wugga. Witness: PC Plod.

At which Chappy writes back and asks"

"You mean THIS witness? This eyes-closed-comatose-gently-snoring witness? I really don't think so..."

To which the law replied "Well, maybe we'll let it slide...."

Don't ask me...(about kids) #27

Mate of mine was in a long supermarket queue the other day, just ahead of a young mum with an out-of-control child.

REALLY obnoxious brat. Pulling things off shelves, screaming, banging the shopping cart against my mate's legs.

Mate politely asks Mum to get Brat to stop doing it, Mum politely asks Brat to stop doing it, Brat continues doing it with increased vigour.

Repeat a couple of times, after which Mate thinks "Sod this for a game of soldiers", gets a carton of yogurt out of his cart and empties same over Brat's head.

Silence ensues, followed by impassioned howling.

And a voice from the rear of the queue.....

"I'll pay for the yogurt"

"The only outfit you can really rely on.....

...these days is the German women's football team" said Mrs. B

All Blacks 18 - 20 France
Australia 10 - 12 England

Who knew she knew.....?

Oh, yeah...

Lewis Hamilton DNF

Don't ask me (about Pete Townsend....) #27

I didn't know that Pete Townsend lived in Chiswick....

Stumbled over this just up the road from my fellow aurally-impaired friend.

Won't bore you again with my vague recollections of the Small Fucking Who and the Fucking Faces, but I do seem to recall a guitar or two meeting their untimely ends at the climax of either My Generation.mp3 or Pinball Wizard.mp3

John Hiatt says it best in Perfectly Good Guitar.mp3

Don't ask me (about Phil the Greek) #26

Prince Philip - apart from being the Boss's husband - has the reputation of lacking an effective firewall between brain and vocal chords.

As in "It looks like it was put in by Indians" after seeing a poorly constructed fusebox.

He can't have been referring to this neatly arranged wiring at Baker St Underground station, can he?

Can he?

More here.

But my favourite has to be

"Do you know they have eating dogs for the anorexic now?" said to a blind woman with a guide dog

Stupid F***ing Poms #1

Jamie Oliver is a seriously good guy.

His cookery books are a treat, his recipes work every time and he does good things.

Like his project to provide school kids with decent food instead of chips and Turkey Twizzlers (containing turkey (34 per cent), water, pork fat, rusk, coating (sugar, rusk, tomato powder, wheat starch, dextrose, salt, wheat flour, potassium chloride, hydrogenated vegetable oil, citric acid, spices, onion powder, malt extract, smoke flavourings, garlic powder, colour [E160c], mustard flour, permitted sweetener [E951], herb, spice extracts, herb extracts), vegetable oil, turkey skin, salt, wheat flour, dextrose, stabiliser (E450), mustard, yeast extract, antioxidants (E304, E307, E330, E300), herb extract, spice extract, colour (E162)

This week, even serious media are full of SHOCK! HORROR! stories that the number of kids eating meals at some schools that have converted to a healthier diet has dropped by a couple of percentage points.

FAILURE! WASTE OF TIME! PACK IT IN!

No-one thought to mention that - even if the number of kids has dropped from, say, 35% to 31% - it STILL means that 31% of kids are eating a healthy diet at school.

Up from 0%.

So the headline could read "31% more kids eating healthier food..."

No?

It's time to get the paper.....

Eh?

We were on the Tube to Richmond yesterday when Ms. jb said "That bloke's hair is like a zoo"

Looked across at him and didn't think he looked that unkempt, but I nodded agreement, being the most sensible option in virtually all situations and continued daydreaming.

Got off the train and the guy's walking in front of us (wearing a an airline uniform) and I ventured that his hair looked no worse than mine.

Blank look.

So I said "Well, YOU said his hair looks like a zoo.."

"No", she said "I said he's Air New Zealand CREW!"

Oh.

Quite similar to what happened to a friend.

His wife turned up after a long absence during the day, the reason for which he'd neglected to store in the cranium.

"Where have you BEEN all this time" he inquired.

"I've been to see Sir Michael Spears"

"Who on EARTH is Sir Michael Spears?"

Turned out she's been to the gynecologist for a cervical smear...

So it's not only me.....