flanerie.org

Apparently the economy is going to hell in a hand-basket. I learned this quaint phrase from a Canadian and I really should have asked him what it actually meant.

A hand-basket sounds like a slow method of transport. Is it a rickshaw or a picnic basket? Going to hell slowly sounds pretty reasonably.

Either way, according to the media, everything is bad.

And yet retail sales in August were 3.9% higher than a year earlier. Strip out inflation and they were still up a smidgen in volume terms. So if, as we are told, Rome is burning (surely endangering the entire hand-basket), man + dog are happily fiddling.

On Saturday I tried to park in my local town centre on a mission to drop my ladies at the theatre and drop some books at Oxfam. All car parks were full.

On Sunday I went to Bicester Village to add some much-needed invigoration to my wardrobe. The queue to get in was over half a mile.

Crisis? What crisis?

[found on El Reg]
Spare a kinky kind thought for one Wicked Wanda this Friday - the Canadian sex shop owner has been robbed of vibrators to the tune of $2,000.

Two sticky light-fingered blighters swiped the joysticks from Wicked Wanda's Adult Emporium in Ottawa at around 2.30am on Thursday morning, cnews reports. However, 41-year-old Wanda Cotie can take a little consolation from the apparent ignorance, or lack of sexual imagination, of the two men.

"They took all the Rabbits but they left the Seahorse, probably because they had enough butt plugs. The Seahorse comes with a butt plug," she explained. "They didn't even touch the German stuff. I don't get it."

The rubber-hungry robbers did indeed bypass all the high-end German erogenous engineering and other expensive happy-making gear, preferring the rather low-rent and humdrum Rabbits and vibrating bullets. Cotie was baffled. "How do you get rid of vibrators? Give them to your friends?"

It does occur that the robbers might use the lurid pleasure-plungers to take inspiration from one Nicki Jex and hold up a bank, but then in the current climate, they'd be lucky to etc. etc.

Sex shops are not infrequent victims of theft. In 2006 three masked men nicked $230 from a sex shop in not especially sex-toy-friendly Georgia, USA, after binding the employees with the very handy black fur handcuffs and silver leg irons lying around the place.

A year previously a man in Moscow ran into the place of business of a naughty things merchant brandishing a knife, and fled with an inflatable doll and some lacy knickers. Hopefully he remembered to put the knife safely in a drawer before enjoying his ill-gotten gains, because, y'know.

Cotie doesn't plan to claim on her insurance and is instead being philosophical. "You just have to swallow it," she said, as the local reporter sent to interview her collapsed to the floor and weakly uttered "g-giggidy".

[from Stuff.co.nz]
A little dog named Leo has been proclaimed a hero after risking his own life to protect four kittens in a Melbourne house fire overnight.

The plucky pooch tested the courage and skills of firefighters as they were forced to dodge fallen power lines to reach him and his young feline companions at the burning weatherboard home in Pilgrim Street, Seddon just before 9pm (AEDT).

Commander Ian Brown said family pet Leo, which remained in the house guarding the family's four-week-old kittens, owed his life to the firefighters.

"They got him out of the house and successfully resuscitated him," he said. "They are just there spending some time now with Leo before they go off duty."

Following a few tense minutes, the animals responded to oxygen and therapy, and were now fully revived.

Commander Brown said the family was relieved to be reunited with their family pets, including the mother of the kittens, which had initially been lost in the incident.

"Everyone's fine. . . we rescued anyone," Commander Brown said.

An 11-year-old girl suffered smoke inhalation as she made her escape, and was treated by paramedics before being taken to hospital for observation.

She was at the home with her 37-year-old mother, a five-year-old sister and 18-year-old brother when the fire started in the front room.

However, Commander Brown said the lives of firefighters were put at further risk, with the family not having an evacuation plan or smoke alarms.

"A proper working smoke alarm and an evacuation plan equals a safer escape."

The cause of the fire is being investigated.