Cunning stunts – tasers revisited

I had a look at what Wikipedia has to say about tasers and found some interesting and also amusing stuff – although not necessarily having both qualities at the same time…
‘Taser and its supporters in the police community regularly attribute the cause of deaths that follow Tasering to “excited delirium”, a phenomenon in which agitated [...]

Simply stunning

So, 30 000 UK police – not just specialist firearms officers – are to be equipped with tasers or ’stun guns’ as they’re commonly known.
Predictably, Amnesty has criticised the move and all I can say is better 30 000 tasers used by the police than 30 000 extra guns, even though it’s a great pity [...]

Mandy lifeboats!

Is this as humorous as Mandelson gets?
I rather think it is…

VAT’ll do nicely?

Is reducing VAT on ‘non-essential’ goods from 17.5% to 15% really going to do any good?
Say I see an mp3 player I fancy that retails at £100 plus VAT today – that’ll cost me £117.50. If VAT then gets reduced to 15% then it’ll cost me £115.
Is that going to make me wait to buy [...]

Trailer trash

I’ve just started watching a DVD I bought the other day – ‘The Mist’, not that it matters – and had to sit through three trailers before I could access the menu. Everytime I tried to get the menu I was told ‘Operation prohibited by disc’!
Now, I don’t mind sitting through all the legal guff, [...]

Have they got yours?

Fascinating!

Something of interest

Say what you like about the BBC but sometimes its radio programs are hard to beat.
I’ve just listened to ‘From our Own Correspondent’ on Radio 4* – always an interesting listen – which kicked off with a story about how hard it is to get credit in Italy and how the Mafia has moved in [...]

Just when you thought…

…things couldn’t get any sillier.
In the government’s propsals re ID cards:
“people undergoing a sex change will be entitled to two ID cards”
and – even better:
“Homeless people wanting ID cards may be able to give their home address as a bench, bus stop or park where they are often found.”
Rearrange these words into a wellknown phrase [...]

A matter of BBC Trust

And still the fallout from the Brand/Ross affair rains down…
For those who don’t know, the BBC Trust – henceforth referred to as the Trust in this entry – is a body set up to act as a watchdog and protect the license payers’ interests; although I’ll leave it up to you to decide if it [...]

OK, it might all be a bit of fun…

…but when I see stuff like this then I start to wonder whether we’re all living on the same planet.
Why, only a few weeks ago we had our beloved PM decrying Brand and Ross.
So, what’s the chance of a government minister saying something about the Baby P case?
Fuck all chance, I’d say.