Amphibian news

Peru arrests German toad-smuggler.
Frogs have regional accents.

For those wanting thoughts on current events

... you're out of luck, I'm just not in the mood. Meanwhile a site of comedy random sentance generators presents The Daily Mail-o-Matic. Why go through the pain of reading the hate-filled nonsese when you can amuse yourself with convincing sounding headlines.

Less depressing than real life.

BBC in Chaos

After they said responsibility for the Andrew Gilligan cock-up may be Greg Dyke's he's resigned. More soon from a more reputable outlet. Despite being guilty of many mistakes and misjudgments, I do find it laughable that some claim the BBC should learn editorial standards from our paper-based press.

Hutton has changed little round here, most trust the BBC far more than the government.

Poem of the day

Edward Lear - The Akond of Swat.

Mentioned as I remember it from far back on a Burns night Scout meeting, recited from memory by Robert Burns- the other PL at Fairfield Morravians. I must have misheard him all those years ago and thought he claimed it as Burns rather than Lear- I think his excuse must have been any poem recited by him was Robert Burns, just not that Robert Burns.

Slightly less violent

A fiendish game that is absent of penguin abuse.

Jenny Tonge

On the one hand what Jenny said was largely speaking indefensible. The words were badly chosen and can be misinterpreted as giving support to suicide bombers. Of course it’s easy for someone to criticise with 20/20 hindsight but the media treatment of Cherie Booth over similar comments last year should have taught Jenny to be more circumspect.

On the other hand this seems to me to be yet another case of the media paraphrasing a comment out of existence. The media reaction is as out of proportion on this, as it was over the original Cherie Booth comments.

This does show how much of a lie the claims our media are anti-Isreali. Had Jenny been seen to be giving a similar or even marginally greater level of sympathy for Israel's soldiers, no one would have batted an eyelid. The Israeli army are supposed to be a legitimate fighting force, yet behave worse than the terrorists they face.

Things

Nicola has gone home to her parents for a couple of days, taking "her" new laptop with her. At present it's just like a big game boy.

Explorers is going okay ish. Yesterday was an international theme with a chopstick challenge (run from one end of the hall to the other over obstacles carrying chick-peas in the chop-sticks.) a stars and stripes challenge (find the star - name the state) and two run around quizes based on water and rice. The run around quizes turned into amble arounds. I don't know whether it's me or whether 14-18 year olds just have short attention spans- but I struggle to get something out of this lot. They don't seem to want to do anything I set, or come up with anything they want to do. Perhaps they just want to go out of a Wednesday night and be entertained.

Managed to get my PC running without crashing- removed the cover and it ran all night nearly.

Problem is this makes it perfect for Nicola to play games on.

Bus rage?

Peter Black (AM) asks why bus drivers are seen as hate figures for some, worse even than politicians.

For some it may be bus lane envy, or traffic jam frustrations causing them to misidentify bis drivers as a target for demonisation. However as a bus user, I see a different side. Bus drivers can't help there being too few buses when people wish to travel, meaning people stand at the bus stop while 95% full buses sweep past. But they can help their attitude towards customers.

Many don't seem to realise that they are customer servants, and as such owe their passengers a certain degree of civility. The other day I got on the wrong bus. Frustrating enough, but the driver had clearly been off the day customer care was taught. I pressed the bell in heavy traffic but we crawled past my stop. It would have made no difference to his schedule to stop in the express area. Nor would a sense of deference towards his customer have cost anything either.

"Do you know what bus this is?" sneered the driver.
"71"
"No X35".
Pause.
"Er are you going to tell me where I can get off?"

Wholly inadequate. A more ideal transaction would have been:

"Excuse me sir, terribly sorry about this, but I think you may have got on the wrong bus. This is the X35 an express service and unfortunately I'm not allowed to stop before the Esso station further up."

But then, as some claim, we've never been much cop at customer service here.

On time

Scout census is due to be emailed in before 18th January, so I did it 10 minutes ago. It's not the 18th for a good oooh 50 minutes is it.

Olympics

London's olympic bid gets unveiled today. Which is nice for them. Well as someone born and brought up in Manchester I'm bound to feel a bit miffed that we laid the ground for them with the highly successful 2002 Commonwealth games, and were then given the cold shoulder by the powers that be. Of course you need a high profile capital city to host Olympic bids. Capital cities like er Sydney, Atlanta and Barcelona you mean?

But pride aside sometimes I'd like public officials to show a bit more humour when being interviewed. Like when faced with inane questions like "What does the bid look like?" the interviewee could quip "lots of pieces of paper." or something. Perhaps that's just my sense of humour, but it would train journos to stop asking stupidly phrased questions.

Googled

I am the google magnification triskaidekaphobia king.

Metro

Metro amuses me with its claim to be "The commuter's favourite."

Perhaps that's because it's free? I've given up picking it up from the disributers at Leeds City station because there are usually many copies lying around on the train to be had.

A quick scan of the paper followed by the letters page will usually highlight how out of step this cousin of the Daly Mail is with its readership.

Hitchhiking

Casting news for the forthcoming Hitchhikers guide film shows the thing is nearer fruition than any casual observers could have dreamed. Latest news is Martin "Tim from the office" Freeman is Arthur and Bill Nighy, as Slatibartfast. Nighy suddenly seems to have sprung from being that entertaining bloke who's been in lots of things but you can't think of his name, to being well known in a short period of time. Wonder if this will have any bearing on the Doctor Who casting.

Hitch Hikers also makes a return to Radio 4 in a month or so when a dramatised version of Life the Universe and everything turns up on Tuesday nights, with most of the original cast. Should be worth watching out for.

Today a brief distraction has been thinking about our spring holiday. We're planning on going to Germany or Austria to go walking in early April. Decisions to be made: when exactly, where exactly, do we take a car or fly and hire?

According to Cheapest Ferry Crossing UK the best two routes are
Hull to Zebrugge (14 Hours) at £150 or Dover to Dunkirk (2 Hours) for £99. We have to decide whether skipping the drive to Dover and a posher ship is worth £50- possibly is in petrol alone- or whether we avoid the extra time at sea.

Nothing on

Not an inspiring day. Nicola is away at her parents, and said she was going out for a curry with the Birmingham SAGGA lot. I said I was going to the Cinema. One small snag- nothing I want to see is on. Oh Return of the King is on at The Lounge but I've not seen the other two parts. And Love Actually is still on, but I'm not going on my own to see that. Nothing else grabs me at the mo.

Reduced to watching Holby City!

Traffic wardens 'get more powers'

Traffic wardens are to be entitled to fine motorists who flout box junctions and no right turn signs. Apart from the proposed scale of the fines I fail to see what the problems are with these proposals. The Torys have counter proposals of dropping points from speed cameras which seem to me to be pandering to popular dumb predudice. As per usual.

Still looking for the RAC's response; there was one refered to on the radio which seemed to be another attempt to defend the individual's "right" to act irresponsibly. I hope they were simply being badly paraphrased, as the media does.

Sister on the run

This afternoon's gentle offering is Whoopie Goldberg in Sister Act.

Strange thing is I always think of this film as being a partial rehash of "Nuns on the Run", starring Robbie Coltrane and Eric Idle. There's even a scene common to both films where the (real) nuns come across a case full of stolen money and decide to put it to good use.

However I've never seen the connection made anywhere else.

And a Happy New Year to all

Spent a lovely coupe of days up at the Wynches Activity centre near Burley in Wharfedale with some friends. Visiting more friends tomorrow.

Normal service will be resumed, but for now I'm too relaxed to blog further. Love to all.