June 2007 Entries

June 29, 2007

The ducks are coming

[El Reg reports...]
Residents of the western UK and Irish coasts have been warned to expect an invasion by a vast flotilla of ghostly, immortal albino plastic ducks, according to reports.

The tale of the floating, whitened bird-simulacra migration is a strange one, dating back many years. It seems that the plastic bathtime companions were originally made in China. They were on their way to America in 1992 when a terrible storm struck their vessel in mid-Pacific, and shipping containers holding 30,000 of the hapless playthings were washed overboard.

A majority of the ducks - at that stage still tinted a healthy yellow - headed south, many of them reportedly finishing up in Australia, where they were doubtless accorded the traditional hostile reception.

Ten thousand of the plastic anatidaens, however, went north, embarking on an endless odyssey across the world's oceans. Like the legendary Captain Vanderdecken in his ill-omened ghost ship the Flying Dutchman, the flocks of plastic kiddy-pals seemed doomed to roam the oceans for eternity.

The luckless fleet of cursed, wandering sea-going toys - Flying Duckmen, perhaps - circled the northern Pacific for some years before a fresh horror befell them as they drifted into the Arctic. Here they became frozen into the pack ice, suffering untold torment in their icy prison as they slowly transited past Greenland into the Atlantic.

Bleached pale by their hellish polar ordeal, the doomed ducks drifted onward. Thawed-out plastic voyagers have landed since the turn of the century in New England, Iceland and Canada, and one may have been found in the western Hebrides in 2003.

A retired American oceanographer named Curtis Ebbesmeyer has monitored the ducks' progress for the past 15 years, and it's his prediction that the plastic playthings' perpetual peregrination may now be headed this way.

Ebbesmeyer briefed the Evening Standard yesterday, saying that "We're getting reports of ducks being washed up on America's eastern seaboard.

"It is now inevitable that they will get caught up in the Atlantic currents and will turn up on English beaches.

"Cornwall and the South-West will probably get the first wave of them."

The Times claims that the globe-trotting bath toys have become collectors' items, and sell for £500. If true, this could mean another greed-crazed beachcomber salvage flotsam bonanza frenzy, with hordes of opportunists descending on Cornish beaches hoping to get rich on the sea's pale, plastic bounty.

We say: bad luck will surely come to those who seek to profit from the Flying Duckmen. Interfere with their eternal voyage at your peril.

Posted by Gerald at 7:51 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 28, 2007

Sleeping on the job

[from Ananova]
A hard-up British Airways worker slept in a works' store cupboard for nearly eight months.

Stephen McNally, 30, bunked down among computers and photocopiers to avoid security.

He got his supper from office vending machines and, before going to bed, would watch telly in the staff room, reports the Daily Mirror.

But the £18,000-a-year manager was rumbled when colleagues noticed he smelt and security found food in the cupboard at the airline's call centre in Scotswood, Newcastle.

A source said: "He'd never leave blankets or anything and there was no trace of his stay...it is amazing he got away with it for so long."

Posted by Gerald at 7:34 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 24, 2007

Sandcastles in deadly killer shock

According to Harvard Medical School, and why would they lie, sandcastles are more deadly than sharks, or at least in the USA. Frankly, it hardly matters since neither of them kills even a tiny fraction of the number that idiots-with-guns kill, but neither beaches nor sharks have clowns like the NRA batting for them, making them a soft fleshy target.
---

[Lifted from the New Scientist]
Sun, sand, sea and surf - the four Ss that spell the idyllic summertime vacation that most of us dream of. But wait, there's danger lurking in this gentle scene... No, it's not the scary shark fin cruising the ocean waves - it's the killer sandcastles.

Yes, research in the New England Journal of Medicine found sandcastles are more deadly than sharks - 16 deaths in the US since 1990 were caused by sandcastles, according to Harvard Medical School's Bradley Maron. Compare that to the measly 12 fatalities from shark attacks. Jaws is looking pitifully like a soft-touch.

The main hazard appears to be people lethally falling into holes they had dug - presumably for the moat - which means the sandcastles of America must be on a far more impressive scale than the ones I'm used to.

Alarmingly, in addition to the prospect of being consumed by their architecture, the bucket-and-spade brigade are at risk of infection from fecal matter. A study published this week in Environmental Science and Technology, found strains of E. coli bacteria that indicate unhealthy levels of fecal matter on US beaches and around Lake Superior. Yuck.

The researchers found two broad types of E. coli in the sand: those "deposited more recently", as team member Michael Sadowsky put it, and those "that have learned to kind of grow or reproduce in the sand," he said. Microbes survive longer in the sand than they do in water, they found, so you may want to wash after a day at the beach.

Posted by Gerald at 7:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 21, 2007

Nothing to see here, move along

[Ripped from stuff.co.nz]
Holidaymakers who only say they plan to sightsee during a visit to Britain could find their tourist visa applications being refused, a monitoring body said in a report.

It is a standard reason given for not granting tourist visas, the Independent Monitor for Entry Clearance Refusals, Linda Costelloe Baker, found in her annual report.

Would-be visitors who have never before travelled abroad could also find it difficult to holiday in Britain.

Costelloe Baker cited one case where an applicant had been told by an officer: "You have never previously undertaken any foreign travel before and I can see little reason for this trip."

"This is a common reason for refusal," she added.

"Entry clearance officers can use some ridiculous reasons when refusing a visa for tourist visits," Costelloe Baker said.

She cited one case where an applicant who had previously travelled abroad was refused entry because the countries were "nowhere near the UK".

In another case the applicant was told he or she did not have a "sufficient command of the language for the purposes of tourism".

Costelloe Baker said in her report: "Well, if knowledge of the language was a requirement for travel, that would certainly stop lots of British citizens going on their hols."

Taking annual vacation in this country was not a good enough reason for one entry clearance officer, while wanting to visit friends near the seaside fell short for another applicant from St Petersburg because he had not said where he wanted to visit.

A would-be tourist who wanted to stay in a hotel in London while visiting friends in Surrey and Kent was turned down because the entry officer had misread it as Cirencester "far from his friends".

Posted by Gerald at 9:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 17, 2007

When the finance guy takes over

After 10 grumpy years Gordon Brown will finally get the job he always coveted and become Prime Minister of Blighty. I wonder how easy it is to switch from being the finance guy to being the top guy. Will he still be all over the finance function at the expense of other important roles, such as rolling on his back while George Bush tickles his nipples with a feather? Or will be overcompensate and let finance go to hell in a handbasket, spending all his time on international junkets?
I wonder this especially because after a little less than two years I am moving from being Finance Director where I work to Managing Director. Or, in American English, I am changing from CFO to CEO. And unlike Gordon Brown it was never part of my master plan.

It will be an interesting challenge and if it all goes wrong I will blame my predecessor, or the parent company, and if things go well I will go to great lengths to point out my inate genius.

Posted by Gerald at 8:47 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 15, 2007

Just another Robin Hood story

[Ananova.reports...]
A German bank manager has been jailed after he took £1.5m from rich clients' accounts and moved it to clients struggling with debts.

Bespectacled and balding, Peter Taubinger, 45, hardly fit the typical image of the glamorous hero robbing the rich to feed the poor.

But under his management, large sums were transferred from the bank, in the small town of Tauberfranken, after he decided poor people needed it more than the rich.

His efforts meant single mothers, pensioners, and even a young man made jobless by ill health suddenly found thousands of pounds credited to their accounts.

But he turned himself in after he realised he could not cover up what he had done any longer, and has now been sentenced to 34 months in prison on 168 counts of embezzlement.

Bauer said: "I felt for the unemployed and the poor and wanted to help them."

Posted by Gerald at 8:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 12, 2007

Leg-humping sniffer dogs busted

[stuff.co.nz reports...]
Two Thai street mutts who became ace sniffer dogs at an airport near the notorious "Golden Triangle" opium-producing region have been fired for urinating on luggage and sexually harassing female passengers.

The pair, Mok and Lai, had been plucked from obscurity under a program initiated by King Bhumibol Adulyadej to turn strays into police dogs, the Bangkok Post said on Sunday.

Although they won plaudits from police for their work in sniffing out drugs at northern Thailand's Chiang Rai airport, near the border with Laos and Myanmar, so many passengers complained about their behavior they had to be fired.

"He liked to pee on luggage while searching for drugs inside," Mok's former handler, Police Lieutenant Colonel Jakapop Kamhon, said. "He also liked to hold on to women's legs."

"Both were just as good as foreign dogs trained for use in drug missions," he added. "But they were stray dogs, so their manners were worse than those of foreign breeds."

Mok and Lai now work on a farm, herding chickens and pigs, the paper said.

Posted by Gerald at 3:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 10, 2007

Slightly greener

After much prevarication my house now uses 100% renewable electricity, with Ecotricity as my new supplier.

Add to this the carbon offset for motoring, which I started in 2006 and my offset for air travel, which I started in January and I am slowly reducing my carbon footprint. For these two, of course, an offset is a very poor substitute for not generating the carbon in the first place, but right now I can't reduce my road miles and am not willing to reduce my air miles. Offset is a reasonable second best.

My next mission is to get my place of work on renewable electricity.

Posted by Gerald at 8:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 8, 2007

The next Olympic sport?

[the BBC surely dreamt that...]
A wheelchair user has been taken for a high-speed ride along a US highway after his handlebars became tangled up in the front grille of a lorry.

The back of the 21-year-old man's wheelchair was scooped up as he passed in front of a lorry leaving a petrol station, Michigan state police said.

The truck driver drove off, completely unaware that he had a new passenger.

Passing motorists told police, who found the man unhurt - but still attached to the front of the truck.

He had been kept in his wheelchair by a seatbelt.

Police in the town of Paw Paw, Michigan, said the unidentified man told them "it was quite a ride", but complained only that he had spilled his soda.

The truck reached speeds of 50mph (80km/h) as it drove down the Red Arrow Highway.

After several miles the driver pulled over at the depot of a trucking company where police then told him about the man on his front end.

He refused to believe there was a man in a wheelchair stuck to the front of his truck until he saw it for himself, police said.

Posted by Gerald at 11:12 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 6, 2007

Explosive orgasm?

[Sadly the BBC did not deem it in the public interest to name the perp...]
Bomb squad officers called in to blow up a suspicious package found it contained a packet of chocolate buttons and a vibrator.

Post Office staff in Hasland, Chesterfield called in police when they heard the package making a noise.

Mansfield Road was closed off for an hour and a half while the bomb squad carried out a controlled explosion.

A police spokesman said: "Officers had no way of knowing what was inside the package. But it gave us a giggle."

He added: "They had to act on the information available and had to do what they thought was right. Thankfully it was nothing more serious."

Posted by Gerald at 4:57 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 3, 2007

I slipped on the soap, honest

A German almost died after using a sink plunger as a bath plug and impaling himself after slipping on a bar of soap.

Dieter Bayer, 79, who moved to Switzerland with his wife Frieda after he retired, decided to use the plunger because he could not find the bath plug.

But as he stood up to soap himself he slipped and fell heavily on the plunger, wedging the wooden handle up his backside.

His wife, 68, who rushed to the bathroom when she heard him screaming in pain, was unable to pull him free and called emergency services.

An ambulance spokesman said: "There was a lot of blood, the injury was very serious, he could have died."

Doctors operated for eight hours to repair the damage and it will be at least two weeks before he can leave hospital.

Posted by Gerald at 6:08 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 2, 2007

Florence

Last weekend we were in Florence enjoying a very relaxing 4 day break, and what a delightful city it is. Rather than do every single museum in a foot-sapping marathon, we went for the laid back approach of sitting around watching the world go by, with only the Uffizi, Accademia and Boboli Gardens planned.

I tried to book both the Uffizi and Accademia in advance but only the latter was available, so we passed on the Uffizi rather than stand in line for a few hours. Still, the statue of David in the Accademia is genuinely impressive. I work on the assumption that the really famous works of art, the ones famous simply for being famous, can only be a disappointment when finally viewed in person, but David fully lived up to its reputation.

A significant proportion of the US population was in Florence for the same weekend but, although it is only a small city, it managed to absorb them with driving me to strap explosives to my body.

The weather was good until the last day, by when it didn't matter, and we brought home a bunch of tasty treats from the central market.

Florence is highly recommended.

Posted by Gerald at 5:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack