"You seem a little agitated...."

...said Mr Homeland Security.

Agitated? Of course I'm bloody agitated.

I've checked in in Los Angeles, taken my bags to the TSA screening point, been shouted at because I've followed the signs to the (non-existent) screening point for Lufthansa passengers, watched my bag be piled on a great heap that appears to have a non-scanned hand search in its future, questioned the logic of same, got the evil eye (but my bag machine-scanned and then hand-searched for my pains), gone through security, where a softly-spoken (for an American) TSA operative is chanting inaudible instructions that no-one can hear, been told to move all my stuff from one conveyor belt to the other (10 meter distant) conveyor belt and then back again, been selected for a hand search (those 180 grams of titanium in Leg 2.0 do it every time...) and then got severely bollocked for expressing a wish to be able to maintain visual contact with my possessions.

Agitated?

Too bloody right I'm agitated.

At least the TSA chappy had the decency to admit that it's all a sham and it does nothing to stop terrorists.

At least that....

My life is @*%#ed without you

The nice lady on the kiddies' program on the German equivalent of National Public Radio plays it and translates it as

"Mein Leben ohne Dich ist nicht so schön - Life isn't that nice without you ".

This place is a real hoot.

They'll play Frank Zappa's "Bobby Brown" without the blink of an eyelid and Gompie had a massive hit with a reworked (NSFW) version of Smokie's "Living next door to Alice".

Just don't ask them to play the Horst Wessel Lied....

Oh.

It was "My life sucks without you", which is fairly mild, I guess.

But they would have STILL played it if it really was "My life is fucked without you."

Which I think sounds better anyway.

Phantom of the (not so comic) Opera

This would be good for a slapstick comedy if it wasn't so serious.

Germany's police forces have been hunting down someone who murdered a policewoman in Heilbronn and tried to murder her partner.

They picked up some DNA from the crime scene and it turns out that the same DNA traces have been found at other crime scenes (murder, break-ins, assaults) dating back 15 years and spread across Germany, Austria and France.

A woman's DNA

It all started sounding a bit implausible when the same DNA was found on the burnt body of an asylum seeker in France.

A man's DNA.

Turns out that the cotton swabs they'd been using were somehow contaminated during the production process by the same (female) worker.

Now, I would have thought that - if you were into QA - you'd take samples of the swabs to assure that they were free of foreign DNA.

Fit for purpose, as they say.

The obvious culprit was the manufacturer - cries of "Let's sue the bastards" - until it turned out that the police

a)  had never specified the purpose of the swabs

and

b) hadn't read the information leaflet which clearly stated that the swabs weren't suitable for harvesting DNA samples.

Oops.

Back to square one.

Or zero

Now, doesn't this take you back...

Savoury mince on toast is a New Zealand icon.

You take some chopped onions, fry them in the pan, add some minced meat, add some gravy and bubble away until it's cooked, whack it on some toast and place it before your unenthusiastic children with (unveiled) threats of what you'll do to them if they don't eat it smartly and get off to school.

At least, that's how I recall the procedure at the Leslie household in Kamo in the 1960s.

Right, Robby?

And still alive and well in Remuera, of all places.....

I'm very sorry.....

...but you've used up too much internet."

Staying at a motel in Richmind that offers WiFi.

Good.

10 MB for free and a pittance per MB on top of that.

There for 4 days, check the mails each day, use bugger-all bandwidth so I'm a bit surprised to get stung for $4 and a bit (on top of a $500 bill)

"You've used more than 10MB" he says.

"Eh? It's not per day? It's 10MB for the ENTIRE STAY. No matter how long you stay?"

WTF tone of voice.

"Yiss" he says proudly "and it says so in the folder in the room"

"So I could check out and check in each day and I'd get 10MB a day"

"Yiss, you could, but it says so in the room click it says so in the room click it says so in the room click it says so in the room"

I did suggest a more sensible and equitable pricing policy, but not a chance.

"It says so in the room click it says so in the room click it says so in the room...."

Good while it lasted

See what I mean?


I didn't bother......

A ray of hope

If I were to live in New Zealand, I'd be writing letters to the editor AT LEAST once a day.

"Disgruntled in Mapua" or something similarly appropriate.

I don't (live there), but I do (write letters to the editor) anyway.

This is a country where it appears to be written into law that there must be a plural disconnect in every sentence spoken on TV - "There's a lot of people here".

No, there's ONE person here or there ARE a lot of people here

Where verbs have to to be turned into nouns at every opportunity.

As in "That's a big ask" for "That's asking a lot.

Which makes you read a headline like "Poor save on GP visits" and think "Oh, they didn't save a lot of money when they went to the doctor" when in fact someone slipped up and used "save" as a verb.

Confuses me.

I wish they'd be consistent.

And don't get me started on apostrophe's..

But there is light at the end of the tunnel.

New World, a supermarket in Albany, has a sign above the fast checkout lane.

"!2 items or fewer"

The sheer elegance of a sentence, recognising the core concept of "more" and "fewer" when dealing with numbers.

I commended them on it.

Blank looks.

It was foolish of me to expect more, of course....

"x" marks the spot....

Big globetrotter that I am, once upon a time I was in Kuantan.

The guy who ran the hotel said "That's good - I can actually understand you"

Eh?

"Yeah" he said "We had another New Zealander staying here who confused the staff totally. She asked for "yigs" for breakfast, as in "have ya got inny yigs?""

"We finally worked out that she wanted EGGS and to this day, the abbreviation that the waitstaff use is "X" for eggs.

So do I.

And then there's the story of the author, Monica Dickens, at a book-signing in Auckland in the 1960s.

A women walks up with her book and says "Emma Chissit".

And Monica faithfully writes

"To Emma Chissit, with best regards, Monica Dickens"

"Nah" says the woman "Emma Chissit. 'Ow much does it COST?"

Not too sure about this place in Albany, though.

Given that they cut hair, it's a pretty cool name.

Phonetically, at least.

I know exactly what's happened.

Someone's come up with "Shearing Shed" as a cool name, the rest of the staff enthuse, the owner (Asian chappy) hasn't a clue what it all means, but writes it down and gives it to the ad agency.

Done deal.

And then they were talking above "toxic acids" in the business news bit on TV One news.

And I'm thinking "Corrosive, yes. But "toxic"?"

Oh.

Toxic ASSETS.....

Please, Miss.....

we have to go to the toilet...

Heating up....

Solved

 James Crook, an American computer scientist has come up with a foolproof algorithm that'll let you solve a Sudoku problem without straining your brain.

Only takes an hour, he reckons.

Now, I'm no Einstein, but I can do one in about 5 minutes. If that.

Enter Boring Old Fart mode

I once did a project in the early 90's with a bunch of brainy buggers from a private university. They reckoned that they could help us optimise the whole cargo business, so off they went.

A month or so later, they came back with a formula that would help us choose the best combination of boxes to maximise the volume utilisation of a 10 cubic metre cargo container.

The presentation was a classic.

Utterly clueless about the business, never even thought of looking at a cargo terminal or even a cargo container, let alone the sort of stuff that gets shipped as cargo.

"We've taken a typical cross section of cargo boxes" said the brain "That would be 7 standard sized boxes"

We give each other a WTF look.

On she drones.

"So there'll be an equal number of these 7 standard sized boxes available for shipping and we've worked out the absolutely optimal selection of boxes to fill the container" she proudly proclaimed.

"And it'll only take 3.7 x 10 to the power of 16 minutes" she said. (Something like that, anyway)

Very impressive.

We later worked out that it was around 2 years.....

This is what the real world is like:

The warehouse foreman will look at all the cargo lined up for the flight (and there sure as hell aren't any "standard sized containers"), walk around it and say " OK, this goes at the bottom at the back, this one'll slot in next to it, put this at the front and the rest of it'll fit in on top. Use the small stuff to fill in the gaps."

0.5 x 10 to the power of 2 seconds.

Just under a minute.

Exit Boring Old Fart mode

Happy Pi Day

Just the job.

True Stories - Tipping

Someone writes:

Many moons ago, I took my late Grandmother out to dinner at (what I then thought) was quite a posh resturant.

At the time, she had two new hips and was failing (85) although still as bright as a button upstairs.

She was also slightly hard of hearing which meant she shouted everything at you.

Anyway, after a nice meal, I paid by credit card. I then rummaged around my pockets for some change- didn't have any.

So I said "Nan, do you have a couple of pound coins"

Rather loudly she said, "POUND COINS? WHAT DO YOU WANT THEM FOR?"

"To give the waiter a tip" I replied (quite sotto voce as the waiter was nearby)

"TIP?" she bellowed "I'LL GIVE HIM THE TIP OF MY UMBRELLA UP HIS ARSE IF HE'S NOT CAREFUL"

Recently seen on Ryanair...

Bad manners

Opel builds cars that not many people want to buy.

Being part of General Motors doesn't help, but they're marginally (if that) profitable at the best of times.

They now want to go it alone and they pretty much said to the Government last week that "they need €3bn".

Of my money.

Didn't anyone teach them to say "Please"?

Not "Could we please have €3bn"

No.

We WANT....

Lack of parental guidance, if you ask me.

But that would be GM, wouldn't it?

The same company that flew into Washington without a business plan and asked for $12bn?

Thought so.