Showing posts with label what where and wow. Show all posts
Showing posts with label what where and wow. Show all posts

Thursday 21 May 2009

What, Why and Where and Wow


'Pringles are a crisp', judge rules - Telegraph if it looks like a crisp, tastes like a crisp then:- And now three judges at the Court of Appeal have agreed, over turning a ruling last year that stated the snack was in fact more akin to a cake or chocolate biscuit than a potato snack.

The decision is a blow for the manufacturers, Proctor & Gamble, which faces a tax bill of £100 million for past VAT and £20 million a year in the future.
The company said it had an agreement with HM Revenue & Customs while the appeal was pending and continued to pay VAT on the product and so there were no back taxes to pay.
Under UK law most food carries no VAT. However, coated biscuits and "potato crisps, potato sticks, potato puffs and similar products made from the potato, or from potato flour, or from potato starch", are subject to a tax of 15 per cent.

An HMRC spokesman said: "We are very pleased with the Court of Appeal's decision."
Of course they are £100 million will pay for the golden handshakes and pensions for all the MPs that stand down Angus Dei politico


WHY.
Surgeon defends 'transplanting' sand dune outside his holiday home - Telegraph a surgeon ordered a mechanical digger to move a "historic" sand dune outside his £750,000 holiday home to improve the view.

Dr Brian Newman has been accused of cutting through the 50ft-high mound on the Promenade at St Annes-on-Sea, Lancs, to give a better panorama from his first floor lounge.

Local authority and wildlife officials have ordered an investigation into the overnight removal of tons of sand to leave a gap in the dunes.

Dr Newman, 65, a world-renowned vascular surgeon, said: "The only rare species I know are the inebriated and drug-affected adults who go onto the dunes and jump off them in what they call fun on a Saturday and Sunday night."

His home is one a few on the Promenade that owns a stretch of the sand dunes.
He added: "Obviously I can do what I like on my land although people may over the years have thought this all to be a public area.

"Whilst it may improve my view that is not the reason for this. What I have done is surgically remove a sand dune and transplanted it further onto the beach where it belongs."

A neighbour said the removal had left the remaining dunes looking like a set of teeth with a front one missing.

What a NIMBY!


Driver arrested over MOT certificate's shade of green Michael Cook, 49, had turned up at a busy Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency centre to renew the tax disk for his car.

He had to queue while holding the required documents including his two-week-old MOT certificate and the one issued to him the previous year.

But a short time after handing them over to a cashier, a policeman arrived and Mr Cook was asked to join him in a side room.

Mr Cook, a self-employed roofer, was informed that staff at the centre in Gosforth, Newcastle, believed his new MOT certificate to be fake because it was a lighter colour than the old one.
He was taken to a nearby police station where he had to give a DNA swab, was fingerprinted and photographed, then placed in a cell.

He returned to the centre later the same afternoon and was finally issued with a new tax disk.
Mr Cook added: "It was a different person serving me this time, but nothing much was said. I think I at least deserve a proper apology for what they put me through."

A DVLA spokesman said they sympathised with Mr Cook, understood his dissatisfaction and would be contacting him to apologise further.

So remember, make sure your MOT certificate is the right shade of green, or better still take up the Govs scrappage offer buy a new car and change it before it needs an MOT.


Three-quarters of British children cannot boil an egg Many youngsters have no idea how long they should leave an egg on the hob for, with a quarter believing it should remain in the saucepan for at least 10 minutes.

A further 12 per cent of children admitted that they did not have a clue.

The study also found that almost half of youngsters never or rarely help prepare evening meals, even though around a third of parents want them to take part.

The poll for the supermarket chain Morrisons said 37 per cent of children preferred watching television or surfing the internet to cooking.

Two in five said they were too stressed about homework or too tired to help cook.

It also revealed that a third of parents had learned to cook from their own mothers and fathers, and 80 per cent viewed culinary ability as an important skill.
So why the f*** aren’t they teaching their kids!


WHERE.
Grandmother lives in 46 homes in 66 years Anna Rains has called a 120ft schooner, a houseboat and even a bus home in her lifetime.

But she finally appears to have cured her wanderlust after buying a haunted cottage she shares with her estate agent husband.

Anna's wanderings started at just 21-days-old when, as a Second World War evacuee, she was sent from London to stay with a family in Llandrindod Wells in Wales.

The oldest of three children, she lived on a bus with mum Hyacinth and dad Alfred from 1947.
The family moved back to a farm in Wales, then Scotland, before a stint in Sussex and Eastbourne.

At 17, Anna went to college in Edinburgh and two years later, her mum gave her a one-way ticket to Hong Kong so she could see the world.

A few months after that, she married Anton Emmerton, a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Army Service Corps and lived on a two-berth yacht.

"By the time I was 39, I'd lived in a schooner in Hong Kong, a houseboat near Chichester, skyscrapers, high rises, town houses, a thatched cottage and a farmhouse," said Anna.
"We moved around Hong Kong seven times, and I lived on a 120ft schooner.

"Looking back, it was stupid. We were out in deep water and there was only us, our baby and a Hawaiian fellow called Sam." After heading back to a cottage in Wiltshire, Anna then moved to Sussex, before living on a Chichester houseboat.

She moved to California in 1968, where she lived in four places in four years.
"It was the height of hippies and flower power," she remembered. "My husband had a business on Newport beach.

"He would sell boats at the front, and coffins and caskets round the back."
In 1983, Anna moved to Brooke House Farm, in Mottram St Andrew, Cheshire, where she lived for 22 years. For the past three years she's lived in a cottage in the same village, which she says is haunted.

Anna lives with Michael Rains, boss of Reeds Rains estate agent, who she married in 1987.
She has no plans to move again but can never say never.

I bet the removal firms are distraught.


And finally:

WOW!

Marks & Spencer penny bazaar deluged by customers looking for bargain - Telegraph The company launched Penny Bazaars at all of its stores to celebrate its 125 anniversary. The three-day scheme – taking M&S back to its roots as a Victorian market stall – saw it set up stalls selling a range of items, from cuff links and mugs, to knickers and purses all for just 1p.
However, thousands of shoppers were left disappointed when M&S run out of its daily stock far earlier than expected.

On average 60 items per second were sold, with 174 stores selling out of all of their products within an hour.

By lunchtime 900,000 customers had visited M&S stores – three times the usual level for a Wednesday morning and it had completely sold out of stock for Wednesday. Many had been queuing outside its flagship store in Marble Arch, London since 5 in the morning.

M&S became one of the most popular terms being discussed on the global micro-blogging site Twitter, as customers swapped information about which stores had stock left.

Sir Stuart Rose, M&S chairman said: "M&S has been at the heart of Britain for
125 years and we believe that this is something worth celebrating. It has been a tough year for us all but people are fed up with being fed up and we wanted to give our customers a real treat."
However, a spokesman was forced to apologise to all those who had missed out.

"The tickets say 'when it's gone, it's gone' and that the items are subject to availability.

The company is re-stocking all of its stores with more penny bazaar items both on Thursday and Friday. In total it has 2 million items on sale for just 1p, with all the money raised going to local charities.

Quick-get down there!
“A bargain is anything a customer thinks a store is losing money on” Kin Hubbard


Angus