The Bully State marches on and on

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10

Here we go.

Plain cigarette packets to be introduced

So Fatso Reilly and his Bully State are lining up for more stupid laws?

There is no reason for this “plain packaging”.  The only “proof” that it puts children off smoking is from showing a bunch of kids some brightly coloured boxes and some drab ones and asking them which they preferred.  That’s about as logical as my telling Herself to wear a blue dress instead of a green proving that I wear women’s clothes.

Not one of the draconian measures has done anything to reduce smoking.  This measure will certainly have no effect whatsoever on the number of people smoking, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the kids started collecting packs like the old cigarette cards to see if they can complete the set.

On the downside, the counterfeiters must be partying like mad and raising their glasses to Fatso.  He is about to make their job so much easier. If you want an interesting insight into the packaging industry then have a read of Nannying Tyrants’ “The Enormous Importance of Packaging”.   Also if you want to make your fortune, now is the time to go into the business either producing stick-on labels for the packs to hide the ugly Anti-Smoker Porn, or to go into manufacturing cigarette cases and boxes.

We already have the gratuitous porn photos on all packets of tobacco and they don’t make the blindest difference to me.  Most are Photoshopped.  Most are totally irrelevant.  The only reason I dislike them is that they are a constant reminder of the Bully State.  Anyway, as soon as I buy a pack I decant the contents into a leather pouch, and their precious “health warnings” go straight in the bin.

Another article well worth reading is Snowdon’s “Ireland, plain packaging and cognitive dissonance” over at the Institute of Economic Affairs.

This is nothing to do with smoking.  This is nothing to do with health.

This is yet another move by a tiny minority who wish to further their own personal pathological hatred of smokers and a desire to top the League of Intolerant States.

Fanning my box

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12

Does anyone here know anything about a yoke called Fanbox?

Apparently a friend of mine was messing with it a year or two ago and entered my email as a recommendation.  That was fair enough.  I forgive my friends most things.  I got an email from Fanbox saying I had been recommended and inviting me to create an account.

Being of the curious type, I gave myself a username and a password.  I sniffed around inside their site, got bored, signed out and forgot all about it.

A while later I started getting emails telling me I had started earning.  Fuck that.  I hadn’t done anything so how could I be earning anything?

I get those emails regularly now.  Nearly every day I get a mail telling me how much I earned the previous day.  My account now stands at $2,335.39 and I now risen to rank 67 in Ireland’s top performers.

I thought that sounded like a reasonable lump of cash so I went to withdraw it.

It told me I needed a PayPal account.

Now I have a PayPal account which is damned handy for paying for porn stuff on the Interweb but I wasn’t going to tell them about that as there is a small surplus in there I don’t want to lose.  I set up a new PayPal account with nothing in it and told Fanbox about it.

They said they wanted an account that was associated with a credit card.

Fuck that.

One thing I have learned to be wary of is people looking for my credit card information.

So the situation now is that they have a lorry load of cash which they say I have earned but I don’t know how.  They say I am quite free to withdraw it but want my credit card details.  I have searched their site but can’t make head nor tail of how they work, who they are and what the fuck they are doing paying me loads of dosh which I can’t touch.

Where do I go from here?

Who the fuck are Fanbox?

There are times when I find the Interweb to be really fucking frustrating.

Smoke is healthy

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10

I have a bit of a thing about trains.

I suppose it comes about from having a father who was a railway engineer and also from numerous trips on the old Irish Mail from Holyhead to Euston in the days when steam was the thing and trains had real beauty and character.

I watched a documentary the other night that I had recorded off the BBC a couple of weeks ago.

It was a documentary on the history of the London Underground which is celebrating 150 years in business.

At one point, I laughed.

Oh, how I laughed!

I often wondered about the Underground before the introduction of electric locomotion, and sure enough, they used to use steam locomotives.  Now those of you who are familiar with steam locomotives will know that they produce one hell of a lot of smoke and steam – one of the joys of being on a steam train is watching the smoke and steam curl away across the fields, but underground?  That must have been a completely different kettle of elephants.

As part of the Underground celebrations they actually ran a steam train trough the Tube and this of course was on the documentary.

UndergroundSmoke
The station just after departure.

Now that picture shows a station after just one train.  How did they cope when trains were passing through on a regular basis?  How did people even breathe in that atmosphere?

And this is where I laughed.

I’ll pass you over to the commentary -

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Yup.

Smoke is healthy!

It just goes to prove you can tell the sheeple anything you like, and they’ll believe every word of it.

 

[If you want to see a steam train run on the Underground the full programme is here.  The steam run starts at around 16:00.  Very impressive!]

Holidays are here again

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28

I have some great news for you all.

I am giving you all a holiday.

In less than a week’s time this site will be dormant.  No longer will you have to rush to read my latest daily drivel.  No longer will you have to rack your brains trying [and failing] to come up with witty comments.

So what’s the story, you ask?

I’m getting outa here.

I’m getting a little weary sitting here starting at the mountains with the sea in the distance, so I am going somewhere where I can stare at the sea with the mountains in the distance.  It’s a subtle difference, but it is a difference nonetheless.

I shall be heading South.  If you take a look at a map of Ireland, I shall be down there in the furthest recesses of the bottom left corner.  To say it is remote is putting it mildly.  I shall have no Interweb there, and I doubt if they have even heard of it in the area.  I’ll count myself lucky if there is electricity.

I’m going there for a few reasons.

My prime objective is to do nothing.  I’m quite good at that but I intend to perfect my technique.  In the event I fail, I may do some photography.  Or I might do a little writing.  Or I may just sit on the rocks at the bottom of the garden and watch the Atlantic waves wash over the rock-pools.  Though knowing my luck it will be more than likely Atlantic breakers washing over the garden and into the house.

I like it down there.  I have spent more holidays down there than most people have had hot saunas.  I know the area almost like the back of my hand [assuming I have been so bored as to spend my time studying the back of my hand?].  In fact I have harboured dreams of living there.  It’s quieter than here, and the climate is a little milder.  It’s about as far as anyone can get from officialdom and rumour has it that the water isn’t just diluted fluoride.  So I may spend some idle time looking at the property market down there.  Last time I was there I did the same and liked what I saw.

I would miss Spanner, Pullit and the gang but they have their own Spanners, Pullits and gangs down there who by all accounts are as eccentric as the mob here so I think I might fit in well.  

So how long will this holiday last?

God knows.

Provisionally it’s for a couple of weeks but that can be extended.

Who knows?  I may never come back.

Wanderlust

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6

I may have mentioned in the past that one of Penny’s great virtues was that she wasn’t a wanderer?

Scratch that.

She has discovered the joys of the outside world.

It started when dogs started breaking in to canoodle with her.  She’s neutered so it must be her personality?

It was quite a frequent thing to see the neighbours dogs playing with her on the lawn.  I didn’t mind as they are friendly dogs and it certainly kept Penny amused.

The problem started though when she started following them home through the holes in the fence they had made.

One of our Sandy’s greatest faults was a tendency to explore the neighbourhood, and I used to spend my time blocking holes she had made in the fence.  It was a joy to find that Penny apparently was quite happy to potter around the garden or just sit on the doorstep admiring the view.  Now I am back to hunting for holes again.  And Penny has two enormous differences with Sandy – she is smaller and can therefore get through smaller holes, and she is short-haired so doesn’t leave tell-tails of tufts of hair around the bolt-hole, as Sandy used to.

I have just spent the afternoon re-fencing the front hedge.  The hedge was heavily overgrown so I had to hack that back first and the whole enterprise took several hours.

For those of you who have never worked with wire netting, it is a massive pain in the arse.  It keeps trying to coil up on itself and its edges are nothing but needle sharp wire.  As a result, I am covered in scratches and as usual am bleeding profusely.    Herself is out with The Coven at the moment and doubtless when she comes back she’ll start nagging me about bleeding all over the furniture.

Sod that.

I’ll just quote the old proverb at her.

You can’t mend fences without cracking eggs?