Dwarf King: PO “locals”: Oh no-no Cocoa: Painting the town: Chuffin Crimbo: and Poodle plod.

Layers of the white crusty stuff at the Castle this morn, the butler is happily storing fat teenagers in the furnace, his Maj managed to go out, do his business and return to the warm in less than a minute and the ducks are ice skating on the moat.

In poor old lonely Blighty

Think of the barmiest thing you can imagine and then add a bit-Old fart and still living in Politico world Tony Benn has come up with a stonking plan.

He thinks that the Queen could be replaced by the House of Commons' Speaker in a republican Britain which maintains a titular head of state.

"If you're looking for a titular head of state I think the Speaker of the House of Commons would be perfect - he's respected, he understands the constitution," Mr Benn added.

 

Bollocks; dopey can’t even control his missus, let alone the country....

And from next June

Allegedly Up to 2,000 rural post offices will close from next summer and be replaced by limited counter services in garages and shops.

Under plans that will be rolled out from June, one fifth of the branch network will be converted into new "PO Locals", which offer a downgraded service within other commercial premises.

Customers will not be able to apply for driving licences, send post bulky mail overseas, pay car tax or make cash withdrawals using passbooks.

The changes will affect one in five of the 11,500 post offices across the country.

Last night the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, which is expected to take over the running of the post office network from Royal Mail in April next year, defended the plans.

Customers would also benefit from being able to access post office services round the clock, during the hours that the convenience store or garage is open.

A BIS spokesman said: “The Post Office network will be maintained at its current size and coverage of 11,500 outlets nationwide and strict access criteria must be met to ensure reasonable access to services for all.

“This is about making sure that people have access to the services they want and need from their post office, at times they want them, and making running a post office more profitable for hard working sub-postmasters.”

As long as they don’t want to “apply for driving licences, send post bulky mail overseas, pay car tax or make cash withdrawals using passbooks.”

  

Stock up on choc

Apparently a shortage of cocoa could lead to a drop in production of chocolate all over the world.

Industry insiders predict a one-million-ton shortage of cocoa within eight years, fuelled by growing demand in Asia, mainly from China.

It means an area the size of the Ivory Coast must become included in cocoa cultivation to boost production to the required levels.

Farmers also need more training to help increase their cocoa bean crops or prices will rise, warn experts.

More cocoa substitutes could be used in making chocolate.

That’ll make finding fat teenagers for the furnace a bit harder for the butler....

East to the land that isn’t China

Tucked away in one corner of the large city of Taichung, Taiwan lies a modest ‘military dependents’ village’ – a community built in the late 1940s and the 1950s to serve as provisional housing for Nationalist soldiers, but ended up becoming permanent settlements.

Over the years, many military dependents' villages have suffered from urban problems such as housing dereliction, abandonment, urban decay, and urban slum. This drab place has now been transformed into a beautiful and vibrant tourist hotspot, thanks to the colourful paintings of Huang Yung-fu, an 86-year-old veteran from Taichung City.

Cheerful, hope he got planning permission...

Back in Chuffin Blighty

National Rail launched its new timetables yesterday.

Changes come into effect across the whole country and will remain in place until Sunday, 20 May 2012.

The main alterations affect service run by the following train operating companies: Arriva Trains Wales, c2c, Chiltern Railways, East Coast, East Midlands Trains, First Capital Connect, First Great Western, Grand Central, London Midland, Merseyrail, National Express East Anglia, Northern Rail, ScotRail, South West Trains , Southeastern and Stansted Express.

Among the changes are:

Retimed early morning trains between Bridgend and Cardiff have been retimed

An increased peak-time service at West Ham, giving additional connections to London Underground and Docklands Light Railway

Reduced journey times to and from London Marylebone

More East Coast trains calling at Berwick-upon-Tweed on Saturdays

An increased number of trains to and from Lincoln

An increased number of carriages on some peak-time Thameslink trains between Bedford and Brighton

A Sunday service during the winter months on the line between Par and Newquay

Faster journey times for several trains between London Paddington and Reading, and on Thames Valley branches (Henley-on-Thames / Marlow)

Additional carriages on trains to and from Walsall, Shrewsbury, Leamington Spa, Stourbridge, Hereford and Stratford-upon-Avon

Increased number of Chester services during the morning peak hours

A new service between Broxbourne and London Liverpool Street, and trains between Bishops Stortford and Stratford running every 30 minutes

Additional evening-peak services between Manchester Piccadilly, Marple, New Mills and Sheffield

Additional trains on several ScotRail routes, including Inverness - Glasgow and Edinburgh, Dundee - Glasgow, Elgin / Aberdeen - Inverness, and Ayr - Girvan

Additional train services during the day between Bromley South and Grove Park

 Click here for live arrivals and departures at your local station if you still have one.....

And finally:

Still over on the right

Police in the western Japanese prefecture of Tottori unveiled two unusual new recruits - a pair of toy poodles, the Nihonkai Shimbun reported.

Fuga, two, and Karin one, passed the police canine test in July and will be put to work finding missing hikers in the mountainous region.

The female toy poodles, one of which is gray and the other brown, also would take part in criminal manhunts, the report said.

Poodles are an unusual choice of police dog -- normally, larger breeds are preferred.

"Their trainers thought the dogs had keen senses and responded exceptionally well to commands," AFP quoted a spokesman as saying.

The remote Tottori prefecture, some 300 miles (480 kilometres) from Tokyo, does not have a full-time police canine force and relies on about 20 domestic dogs with special training to help when needed.

 

What can you say.....

  

That’s it: I’m orf to keep an eye on the weather. 

And today’s thought:

Angus

Pipped at the post: You pays your money: Washington water feature: Cut to build: Mobile rabbit: Bad advice: Adventurous Aussies’: and Time to tell.

More than cold at the Castle this morn, white crusty stuff all over the Honda as well as on the inside, the study is rapidly filling up with extinct enumerators and the butler is out gathering fat teenagers for the furnace.

I watched the final Grand Prix of the season on BBC1 yesterday, because of the cuts next year Auntie will only be showing ten of the twenty races live-the other ten will be “highlights”, but they have managed to “save” enough dosh to continue to pay ‘celebs’ to dance around at our expense.

For certain readers-Pippa Middleton has signed a six-figure publishing deal worth £400,000 to write a guide to party planning, which will be released in time for Christmas next year.

The book will be a guide to being the perfect party hostess. It will include recipes, anecdotes and details of how to throw a range of different types of event.

 Can’t wait....

Dying to get into hospital?

Click on the link above to find out if you will be dying to get out again....

Over in the Eastern states

Apparently “our” man in Washington “Sir” Nigel Sheinwald has splashed out £2,644 on a fire place and water feature to spruce up his office.

As a man who was brought in to preside over a new period of austerity, Sir Nigel raised eyebrows within the diplomatic world with his sumptuous office. “It looks like a James Bond villain’s lair,” whispers one. “It had to be refurbished in the final days of his predecessor, Sir David Manning, causing him great inconvenience.”

It remains to be seen whether Sir Nigel’s successor will retain the chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce, with its white leather seats and built-in passenger television sets, as his official car.

All together now....”we are all in this together”...

Back in bollixed up Blighty

Son of a B....aronet (and alien reptile in disguise) George (I can count the number of cock ups on all three hands) Osborne is expected to announce another £5bn in spending cuts to pay for new building projects.

Badfart Snufflebum as he known among the rest of the extraterrestrial sideboard is to set out plans for a £30bn national infrastructure programme as he tries to breathe new life into the stalled economy.

A deal struck with pension funds will see £20bn invested in the decade-long programme, with the remaining cash coming from further spending cuts.

The first £5bn will come from spending cuts during the current spending period - up until the financial year 2014-2015.

A further £5bn will then come from spending cuts in the following spending period.

Schools, roads, power stations and high speed broadband will be some of the areas to receive a boost.

 There go even more of our pension funds....

Back over to the mild West

Lakeysha Beard, talked for more than half a day while on an Amtrak train going from Oakland, California, to Salem, Oregon. The loud mobile conversation lasted sixteen hours last Monday, after which police stopped the train for twenty minutes to arrest the woman.

In the train's car, a few passengers asked the woman to put the phone away or to stop a few times during the conversation prior to notifying the train staff. Staff members were unable to convince the woman to end the conversation and stopped the train to arrest the woman and halt the disruption.

 I just want to know which mobile has sixteen hours talk time....

And the newest member of the Royal Family

Is allegedly taking beauty tips from her stepmother-in-law, Duckess Kate has been receiving treatments from Deborah Mitchell after Duckess Camilla, the old nag wife of Prince Charles, recommended the beautician's bee sting facial.

Apparently Deborah has been treating Camilla for six years now. Like any customer who finds something good, Camilla has told her friends and in-laws, including Kate. Now she visits the Royal Family wherever they are in residence.

Which explains quite a lot....

Dahn Unda

Traditional beer sales are dropping as Australians are tempted not only by wine but by an increasingly varied range of other alcoholic drinks like trendy ciders and locally brewed ales.

Beer consumption per head has now slumped to a 60 year low according to recent figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

It was the Foster's TV ads of the 1980's featuring actor Paul Hogan as the stereotypical Aussie bloke, which helped plant the image of Australian men being huge fans of the "amber nectar".

However even that iconic Australian brewer has hit on tough times and Foster's now looks set to be sold to a London based company, SABMiller.

Do I give a XXXX...

And finally: 

As time moves on

Did you know?

As far as we know, time began with the formation of the universe in the instant of the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.

 Our Sun is about five billion years old. The Earth is estimated to be 4,540,000,000 years old.

Earth was created on the evening of Saturday, October 22, 4004BC, according to James Usher the 17th Century Archbishop of Armagh who came to this conclusion by adding up the family histories mentioned in the Bible - such as Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel.

The oldest rocks yet discovered on Earth are crystals of zircon from Western Australia, which are more than 4.4 billion years old.

Between 1929 and 1940 the Soviet Union changed the length of the week t h re e times. In 1930 Stalin abolished weekends to fulfil work quotas. In 1931 it went to a six-day week and back to a seven-day week in 1940.

In the International Fixed Calendar, invented by Englishman Moses Bruine Cotworth in 1859, there are 13 months - with the extra month called Sol.

In 1836 John Belville began to sell time. He set his pocket watch at the Greenwich Observatory where he worked every morning and would sell the precise time to clients in the City. The family business went on until 1940.

Mice normally live to a maximum of three years of age, chickens to 10, cats to 21, horses to 40, goldfish to 49, elephants to 70, giant tortoises to 150 and whales to 200.

 A nanosecond is one billionth of a second... a long time compared to the femtosecond, the attosecond and the shortest possible unit of time - known as Planck time.

 The Julian calendar assumed a year is exactly 365.25 days - about 10 and three quarter minutes too long. By 1582, it was 10 days out of sync, so Pope Gregory XIII decreed that 10 days should be lost to put things right.

 Rock beneath Niagara Falls is worn away at a rate of about a metre a year by the flow of water from Lake Erie 165ft above.

 When the railways first reached Bristol trains seemed to leave 11 minutes early. The problem was the drivers had come from London, 200 miles west, where sunrise is 11 minutes earlier. The only sensible solution, applied in 1940, was for all UK trains to use London time or "railway time".

Beans, peas and tomatoes are said to grow best if planted in the second week after the new moon.

Count the seconds between seeing a flash and hearing thunder. Three seconds' delay means the lightning strike is 0.6 miles away.

Hummingbirds beat their wings 90 times a second when they are hovering. Flies can beat theirs more than 1,000 times a second.

Legend says the first Roman calendar came from Romulus, who was raised by wolves with twin brother Remus and founded Rome in 735BC. He was keen on the number 10, so his years had only 10 months.

At Julius Caesar's command in 46BC two new months were introduced - July named after him and August after his successor Augustus. This Julian calendar also had leap years.

Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox.

If Earths history were compressed into 24 hours then the first humans would appear just 40 seconds before midnight.

Bristlecone pines are the oldest single organisms on Earth. Some have lived more than 5,000 years.

Info from The Book of Time, published by Mitchell Beazley, £20, www.octopusbooks.co.uk

That’s it: I’m orf to the Robot Olympiad.

And today’s thought:

Angus

Abandon Sterling: Toxic mortgages: Out of sight Royals: ‘Event boundary’: Tyred out Earth: and a sea bass Numpty.

Misty, murky and miserable at the Castle this morn, the elbow has returned to normal size, has a bruise as big as Greenland and still hurts.

The study is still devoid of any ex adding machines and his Maj is still bringing me worms. 

A smidge late this Monday, had to go down to Tesco on the stale bread, gruel and Pussy food run.

According to Wolfgang Schäuble ‘Blighty will join the euro before long’

Germany’s finance minister reckons despite the current crisis in the eurozone, the euro will ultimately emerge as the common currency of the entire European Union. He said he “respects” Britain’s decision to keep the pound, but insisted that the survival and eventual stabilisation of the euro will convince non-members to join the currency club. “This may happen more quickly than some people in the British Isles currently believe,” he added.

Bollocks, and don’t even think about it Prime Monster.

And our own Piss Poor Policy Millionaires Club Coalition

Has come up with a stonking plan to fuck up the economy even more-Plans to allow first-time buyers of new homes to borrow up to 95% of the value, with the government underwriting part of the risk, are to be unveiled.

They are part of a scheme to deal with an acute shortage of affordable homes, set to be revealed by David Cameron.

The initiative, for England only, will begin in July and aims to build 16,000 new homes and create up to 32,000 jobs.

It includes a £400m fund which will help to kick-start schemes which are ready but lack necessary finance.

The government call the plans "radical" and a "step change" in their approach. However, Labour say ministers have failed to deliver on housing.

Err; isn’t lending money to people who default on mortgages what got us in this pile of crap in the first place...and for ‘the Government’ read ‘the Taxpayer’.

Royal ‘family’

A new documentary has discovered that the Queen had two cousins who were hidden away in a mental asylum for most of their lives and had no contact with their family.

A channel 4 film will portray the Royal Family as callous and neglectful in their treatment of five "hidden cousins" of the Queen who were locked away in the same mental asylum for decades.

At the heart of The Queen's Hidden Cousins is the emotional story of two royal relatives, Katherine and Nerissa BowesLyon, nieces of the Queen Mother, who were never visited by the Royal Family nor invited to any royal event at Buckingham Palace.

Indeed, the Bowes-Lyon family, into which the Queen Mother was born, announced in Burke's Peerage that Nerissa had "died in 1940", even though she was alive in the asylum; the same publication also published that Katherine had died. The family would later put these errors down to "vagueness".

Nerissa did die in 1986 but her sister Katherine is still alive in a Surrey nursing home. She is 85, the same age as the Queen.

The death of Nerissa brought the shocking revelation that not only was her sister Katherine in Royal Earlswood but three sisters from the Fanes family lived at the hospital. They were connected to the Bowes-Lyons on mother Fenella's side.

Nerissa now has a proper headstone, although the rumours are that the "grave was dug deep enough for two". The eventual gravestone was paid for by their niece Lady Elizabeth Anson.

Katherine was moved to Ketwin House in Surrey where patients were charged only £770 a year at the time of its closing after allegations of physical abuse.

She is now resident in another nursing home in Surrey where "she has been taken on holidays around Britain by the staff".

To this day, however, she has never been visited by a member of the Royal Family.

Neither Buckingham Palace nor Glamis Castle wished to contribute to the Channel 4 programme.

Makes you proud.......

Why did I come in here?

Ever walked into a room to get something only to forget why you went there in the first place?

New research from University of Notre Dame psychology professor Gabriel Radvansky suggests that passing through doorways is the cause of these memory lapses.

"Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an 'event boundary' in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away," Radvansky said in a statement. "Recalling the decision or activity that was made in a different room is difficult because it has been compartmentalized."

The study was published recently in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.

 

 Oh good; and I thought it was just the onset of old fartship....

Over in the land of odd spelling

The sprawling pile of hundreds of thousands of tires isn't easy to spot from the ground, sitting in a rural South Carolina clearing accessible by only a circuitous dirt path that winds through thick patches of trees. No one knows how all those tires got there, or when.

But, Calhoun County Council Chairman David Summers says of this giant rubber menace, "You can see it from space."

Authorities have charged one person in connection with the mess of roughly 250,000 tires, which covers more than 50 acres on satellite images. And now a Florida company is helping haul it all away.

Litter control officer Boyce Till said he contacted the local sheriff and state health department, which is investigating who had been dumping the tires.

But the worst possible penalty that could be imposed locally is a single $475 ticket for littering.

Records show the property is owned by Michael Keitt Jr. of Far Rockaway, N.Y.

Tricia Johnson, owner of Lee Tire Company, Inc., said a property owner whom she declined to name called her for help hauling off the material. So far, Johnson said between 10 and 15 tractor-trailer loads of tires have been shipped to her Florida facility. There, they will either have oil and steel extracted from them, or they will be shredded and made into tire-derived fuel, which Johnson said burns more cleanly than coal and is used by paper mills.

Johnson said she has waived her usual fee and is charging the property owner only for transportation costs. She hopes to have all 250,000 tires processed by early 2012.

Tyred out?

And finally: 

Back over to Welsh Wales

Kurt Price was delighted with the huge fish he caught and ate – until he realised it would have been a record-breaker.

Kurt, 25, reeled in the monster sea bass on a weekend trip to Tenby, south-west Wales.

It was only after he had cooked and eaten it that he researched the record books and realised his catch would have been the biggest of its kind.

The record for a shore-caught sea bass is 19lb 11oz. Angling experts who have seen a picture of Kurt’s catch believe it was bigger than 20lb.

But Kurt, of Cwmbran, Monmouthshire, cannot claim the record because he failed to weigh the fish – and has eaten the evidence.

Kurt said the fish was very tasty but added: “I’m gutted.”

 So was the fish.....

 Piscean Pillock....

That’s it: I’m orf to launch a robot into the moat. 

And today’s thought: Fishermen fall for it, hook, line and sinker.

Angus 

THE BEST SIDE OF THE ROYALS

Enough knocking: take a look at the other side of the royal family.

I am not a royalist, but I do believe that although they cost too much the Windsor family have done, and are doing a great deal of good for Blighty.

And just to get it out of the way-Prince Harry apologises to Asian soldier in video race row

Prince Charles made 560 visits in 2008, Princess Anne made 534, her Royal Maj made 417 and P Philip made 354.

Personally I wouldn’t go out in the cold to see a royal, but a lot of people do and enjoy the pomp and circumstance surrounding the Windsor’s.

Mouth not attached to brain maybe, Prince Harry does his bit with the Children of Courage awards.

And we all know Prince Philip’s penchant for foot in mouth utterances, but nobody seems to mind.

Take a look at the Monarchy Today website, even if you hate them it is worth perusing.

So come on people there are much more important things to moan about, lets be grateful for them, and allow them their faux pas, which I am sure are not deliberate.

Let’s stop banging on and be proud of them, after all we are all human.


“Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.”- Paul Boese


Angus