Twitter Twat: Marmite Dahn Unda (and right a bit): The Cucamelon: Farting smokers: and Popeye’s home.

Masses of skywater, minimum atmospheric movement, much lack of warm and bugger all solar stuff (as usual) at the Castle this morn, the right elbow is still excruciatingly painful but at least I can use one finger-hence today’s load of old bollocks.

 

Son of a B.....aronet and alien reptile in disguise

George (fiddler in the sideboard) Osborne has decided to concentrate his massive lack of intelligence on something even more important than the economy-he wants to get more followers on Twitter than starey eyes Ed Balls.

Mathematically challenged Osborne who started using his account (@George_Osborne) yesterday morning, has already racked up over 34,000 followers despite having only sent four tweets.

In contrast, the Shadow Chancellor has sent over 3,000 tweets, and has gained over 77,000 followers.

When challenged by Daybreak presenter Lorraine Kelly as to whether he spent most of yesterday on the micro blogging site, Osborne replied: "I confess I didn't spend most of yesterday doing it. I did a couple of tweets and I'm getting used to it. But it's a pretty fast and furious world out there on Twitter.”

Within minutes of sending his first tweet, which included a photograph of the Chancellor apparently adding some final touches to his Budget, he was bombarded with abusive tweets.

 

Took me bloody ages to write them....

 

Dahn Unda and right a bit

Marmite has returned to New Zealand, after the 2011 earthquake in Christchurch makers, Sanitarium, closed its factory but "From March 20, Marmite is back on supermarket shelves across NZ.

Marmite was originally imported into New Zealand but by 1919 the country had come up with its own version, which tastes quite different from the English version.

As a result, importing English Marmite simply would not work, said Pierre van Heerden, Sanitarium's general manager.

Earlier in March Mr Van Heerden and former All Blacks captain Buck Shelford visited Christchurch to deliver some of the new jars.

 

Spiffing, think I’ll stick to the Blighty version

 

And all over Blighty in the “spring”

Gardeners will now be able to grow cucamelons which are the size of a grape but looks like a watermelon and it tastes like a cross between a cucumber and a lime.

Suttons Seeds has started stocking the plants, Latin name Melothria Scabra.

A spokesman said: “The fruit can be used in a variety of dishes, including salads and salsa, or on a cocktail stick in a Martini, which works quite well.” 

Can’t wait, all you have to do is dig through the snow, break up the frozen soil with a pickaxe, sow your cucamelons and wait, and wait and.......

 

West to the land of Canadians

 

Ontario anti-smoking ads featuring young adults farting up a storm at a party has gone viral.

In its new Quit The Denial campaign, the province's health ministry compares social smoking to social farting.

"Well, it's true that I fart. But I wouldn't call myself a farter. I'm a social farter," says the blonde woman featured in the ads, as the camera pans across a party full of young, hip Ontarians letting 'em rip.

"I really only do it when I hang out with my friends that fart. We hang out. We drink. We dance. Just have some fun being together, farting."

The campaign highlights similarities between social smokers and social farters, noting they both do it to break the ice, and the smell tends to linger.

The video has run on blogs, ad sites and newspapers around the world.

Since then, the province has released videos comparing social smoking to social earwax picking and social nibbling food off other people's plates.

 

Nice to see that Canadians are into social equality....

 

And finally:

 

East to Malta

Tucked away in the small island is a place you’d probably never expect to find in the real world– Popeye’s Village. Also known as Sweethaven Village, it is an ideal family-vacation spot and one of Malta’s major tourist attractions. The fun park is modelled on the theme of the favourite children’s cartoon character, Popeye the Sailor Man. Interestingly, this village was the actual set used by Paramount Pictures and Walt Disney Productions to shoot the 1980 film Popeye, based on the comic strips by E. C. Segar.

At Sweethaven, you can expect to see models of all the main characters of the popular children’s cartoon – Popeye the Sailor, Olive Oyl, Bluto, Swee’Pea and Wimpy. You can also go on joy rides and visit play houses, puppet shows, museums, and cinema sessions featuring the film Popeye and the construction of the set. You can even star in your own film, record it and take it home. But that’s not all, there are a host of other things to see and experience, like face painting, balloon modelling, storytelling, open-air barbeques, crafts and Wii games. There’s also a mini golf course and a free wine tasting for adults. The season-specific activities are a huge hit as well, these include water trampolines, play pools and boat rides during the summer and a Christmas Parade along with Santa’s toy town in December.

 

Lovely, but at least the banks are still open….

 

That’s it: I’m orf to check the garden for wasp spiders-just in case

 

And today’s thought:

Aspiration Nation

 

Angus

Charlie and the “über-technical land yacht”: Japanese face pants: A couple of brain dead bong bangers: Letting rip at 30,000 ft: and Einstein-Rosen bridges.

A nice snatch of Dawn’s crack, oodles of scrapey, scrapey stuff, nary a breath of atmospheric movement and quite a lot of lack of warm at the Castle this morn, just returned from the stale bread, gruel and his Maj’s food run dahn Gee-up Tesco, the freezer thingies are full to bursting with Spag-Bol, “beef” hot pot and many, many other “processed” food stuffs from bovine sources, I took the calculator to sort out the cat food multi-buy/discount things and the cash machine decided it only wanted to hand out twenty squid notes which pleased the till operator no end.

 

Apparently due to a withdrawal of labour by Aunties “journalists” there is no news today so here is what I have managed to dredge from the interweb thingy.

 

Apparently old fart Charlie and the old nag are about to get a new motor

The £300,000 BMW is being considered by security chiefs after the royal couple’s limo was ambushed by a mob during student fees protests in December 2010.

The Prince and his wife looked shaken as demonstrators chanted “Off with their heads” and pelted the car with paint and bottles, smashing a window.

The BMW 760 – currently being tested by Scotland Yard – is capable of repelling bullets and gas, and has a removable bulletproof windscreen for an emergency exit.

Ex-head of royal protection Dai Davies said its planned use “marks recognition that after the disaster of the attack during the student riots, proper care is being taken to ensure the royal couple are secure”.

Dubbed an “über-technical land yacht”, the German model could be brought in to use later this year.

But Labour MP John Spellar said instead of choosing BMW, “police bureaucrats” should support British carmakers and go for a Jaguar.

 

Which is owned by India’s Tata....there’s a coincidence

 

East to the land where radiation has had no effect at all

The latest fashion trend sweeping Japan is schoolgirls wearing panties on their heads.

Photos are popping up of Japanese schoolgirls donning panty masks while doing mundane activities like laundry and performing karaoke.

Apparently Japanese superhero “Hentai Kamen” has inspired the trend. Billed as “the abnormal superhero” under salutations such as “panty bless you,” Hentai Kamen is a strange “homo-erotic parody of a Power Ranger” who wears panties on his head to conceal his identity and … nothing else.

Hope they washed them first....

 

West to the home of the lucky and the land of the idiot

Two brothers who were celebrating a $75,000 winning lottery ticket by purchasing marijuana and meth accidentally blew up their house on Friday, said Sgt. Bruce Watts of the Wichita Police Department.

The explosion sent one of the brothers – a 27-year-old – to the hospital, where he remains in serious but stable condition with second-degree burns on his hands, arms and chest.

The other brother was sent to jail, Watts said.

The brothers were in a house in the 100 block of North Nevada Court, near Douglas and West Street, about 7 p.m. Friday, Watts said. One of the brothers went to the kitchen to refuel the butane torches they planned to use to light their bongs. He emptied a couple of large cans of butane lighter fluid, leaking butane into the air.

“The butane vapour reached the pilot light in the furnace, and as you might expect, ka-boom,” Watts said.

The victim was wearing a lottery T-shirt during the explosion.

The victim’s girlfriend loaded him and some children into a car and took him to the Via Christi Hospital on St. Francis emergency room, where she dropped him off and left.

Officers went to the house with a warrant, where the other brother ran out, admitting he had marijuana and methamphetamine. He was arrested.

 

Natural justice?

 

According to “scientists”

 

In their report titled, 'Flatulence On Airplanes: Just Let It Go,' published in the New Zealand Medical Journal Friday, a team of British and Danish gastroenterologists suggest it's healthier to pass wind than fight the turbulence brewing within.

We tend to fart more on a plane because of changes in the volume of intestinal gasses as cabin pressure changes, they said, and restraining gas could lead to a raft of "significant drawbacks" including discomfort, pain, bloating, indigestion, stress and heartburn.

As well, battling the body's need to break wind could be problematic for those afflicted with fart incontinence or those who had fallen asleep, leaving both groups open to the embarrassment of involuntary farts triggered by turbulence, coughing and sneezing.

Other than assaulting fellow passengers' nasal passages, taking the advice of the researchers has other drawbacks.

"Obviously, proximity to other passengers may cause conflict and stigmatization of the farting individual," the team said.

 

No shit..... 

And finally:

 

According to other “scientists”

 

Our universe could be located within the interior of a wormhole which itself is part of a black hole that lies within a much larger universe.

Such a scenario in which the universe is born from inside a wormhole (also called an Einstein-Rosen Bridge) is suggested in a paper from Indiana University theoretical physicist Nikodem Poplawski in Physics Letters B. The final version of the paper was available online March 29 and will be published in the print edition April 12. Poplawski takes advantage of the Euclidean-based coordinate system called isotropic coordinates to describe the gravitational field of a black hole and to model the radial geodesic motion of a massive particle into a black hole. In studying the radial motion through the event horizon (a black hole's boundary) of two different types of black holes -- Schwarzschild and Einstein-Rosen, both of which are mathematically legitimate solutions of general relativity -- Poplawski admits that only experiment or observation can reveal the motion of a particle falling into an actual black hole. But he also notes that since observers can only see the outside of the black hole, the interior cannot be observed unless an observer enters or resides within. "This condition would be satisfied if our universe were the interior of a black hole existing in a bigger universe," he said. "Because Einstein's general theory of relativity does not choose a time orientation, if a black hole can form from the gravitational collapse of matter through an event horizon in the future then the reverse process is also possible. Such a process would describe an exploding white hole: matter emerging from an event horizon in the past, like the expanding universe." A white hole is connected to a black hole by an Einstein-Rosen bridge (wormhole) and is hypothetically the time reversal of a black hole. Poplawski's paper suggests that all astrophysical black holes, not just Schwarzschild and Einstein-Rosen black holes may have Einstein-Rosen bridges, each with a new universe inside that formed simultaneously with the black hole. "From that it follows that our universe could have itself formed from inside a black hole existing inside another universe," he said.

Ah; the old Euclidean-based coordinate system known as isotropic coordinates ploy eh....

 

That’s it: I’m orf to get the one remaining left handed brain cell rewired.

 

And today’s thought:

Über Numptys

 

Angus

Redhead rally, The price of fame, Alpine’s fine, Vetted volunteers and Pizza payout

It was a bit of a strange day yesterday, the radiator is in the car which is good, the other odd thing is that Angus Dei on A&S received an extra 70 or so hits from all over the world, on one particular post Angus Dei on all and sundry: Domestic bliss, a copulating copper, Duh! Welsh whisky and another Numpty and one particular photo was very popular.



No complaints from me, but is this the baseline for my blog, this picture has been very popular for a while now, and I have posted it again for your perusal, I only check my hits once a week on Friday, but I may keep a closer eye on them from now on.






Anyway back to “business”


First up:

Redhead day needs more....... redheads

The organiser of the world's first event celebrating natural redheads has called on Scots to let down their hair.

Bert Rouwenhorst, the founder and organiser of the Roodharigendag (Redhead Day) in the Netherlands, welcomed less than a dozen Scots to the fifth annual event last week.

Mr Rouwenhorst, 38, told The Scotsman: "I would say to all the redheads in Scotland, come to Holland. You will be treated like a film star. "People cheer you as you walk down the streets and take your photograph. It is very good for the children, especially."One of the Scots who travelled to the event, Alan Petrie, from Aberdeen, said: "I came here because I wanted to see if people with red hair would like to meet each other – we could take that back home and see if it worked on a more local level. I think redheads do enjoy being together and not being the odd one out.

Redheads of the world unite.

"Big Brother" Turkey

Turkish military police said Thursday that they had stormed an Istanbul villa to rescue nine women held captive after being tricked into believing they were reality show contestants.

The women were rescued on Monday in the villa in Riva, a summer resort on the outskirts of Istanbul, a spokesman for the military police in the region who carried out the raid told The Associated Press. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to give details of the raid to the media. He said the women were held captive for around two months but refused to provide further details.

The women were made to believe they were being filmed for a Big Brother-type television show, the private Dogan news agency and other news reports said, without citing sources. Instead, their naked images were sold on the Internet, the reports said.

The women had responded to an ad searching for contestants for a reality show that would be aired on a major Turkish television station, Dogan said. The nine, including a teenager, were selected among several applicants following an interview, it said.

They were made to sign a contract that stipulated that they could have no contact with their families or the outside world and would have to pay a 50,000 Turkish Lira fine (US$33,000; C23,000) if they left the show before two months, the agency reported.

Dogan and HaberTurk said the women soon realized they were being duped and asked to leave the villa.

The women were told they could not leave unless they paid the fine and those who insisted were threatened, Dogan said.

HaberTurk said the girls were models from in the Mediterranean resort of Antalya and the Aegean port city of Izmir.

“We were not after the money but we thought our daughter could have the chance of becoming famous if she took part in the contest,” the newspaper quoted one of the women’s mother as saying. The paper identified her only by her first name, Remziye. “But they have duped us all.”
She said the women were not abused or harassed sexually.

They were told however, to fight each other, to wear bikinis and dance by villa’s pool, the paper quoted the mother as saying.

HaberTurk said police detained four people who lived with the women at the villa at all times. They were released from custody pending the outcome of a trial, the report said. Their identities were not released and it was not know what the charges were.

HaberTurk said police were still looking for the gang’s leader who sold images of the women on the internet, according to the report.

Police refused to comment on the suspects or the charges brought.

The “Big Brother” TV show, which is called “Someone is Watching Us” in Turkish, confines a group of people to a house under the constant gaze of cameras. Contestants are evicted one by one from the house.

It all seems a bit pervy to me, but what were the parents thinking of?

Bad wind break

An Austrian man has been fined £45 for breaking wind while he was being questioned by police officers.

Police in Graz said the laughter of passers-by humiliated them, giving them grounds to book Hansi Sporer, 20, under local anti police abuse laws.

"This was no accident. He clearly intended to make a laughing stock out of the officers and deserved what he got," said one police source.

The Safety and Security Act allows police to issue instant fines to people who insult or attack them.

Lawyers for Sporer, from Frohnleiten, near Graz, argued that his outburst had been accidental.
"This was an abuse of a serious law intended to protect police officers from serious attacks by members of the public not some trivial incident.”In the end Mr Sporer decided it was easier and cheaper to pay the fine than it would be to fight it."

Well at least he didn’t “follow through”, wonder what the fine for that would be.

Big Brother again

Parents who regularly ferry groups of children on behalf of sports or social clubs such as the Cub Scouts will have to undergo criminal record checks - or face fines of up to £5,000, it has been disclosed.

They will fall under the scope of the Government's new Vetting and Barring Scheme, which is aimed at stopping paedophiles getting access to children.

Failure to register with the Independent Safeguarding Authority, the Home Office agency which administers the scheme, could lead to criminal prosecution and a court fine.

The clubs themselves face fines of £5,000 if they use volunteers who have not been cleared.

Parents who host foreign pupils as part of school exchange trips will also have to be vetted.

A total of 11.3 million people in England, Wales and Northern Ireland are expected to register with the ISA.

All 300,000 school governors, as well as every doctor, nurse, teacher, dentist and prison officer will also have to register because they come into contact with children or "vulnerable" adults at work.

The scheme was recommended by the Bichard report into the Soham murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman by the caretaker at their school, Ian Huntley.

Huntley was given the job despite allegations of sex with underage girls in his past, which were not passed on.

It will be the biggest of its kind anywhere in the world and involve unprecedented delving into the subject's personal and employment history.

Two hundred case workers based at the ISA in Darlington will collect information passed to them by the police, professional bodies and employers and rule on who is barred.

Taking the piss or what? Watch the numbers of volunteers plummet, which will help everyone won’t it.

And finally:

Fat gits bosses forced to pay

From across the water.

A pizza shop must pay for a 340-pound employee's weight-loss surgery to ensure the success of another operation for a back injury he suffered at work, an Indiana court has ruled.

The decision in the Indiana Court of Appeals, coupled with a recent Oregon court ruling, has raised fears that employers might think twice before hiring workers with health conditions that might cost their companies thousands of dollars down the road.

"This kind of situation will happen again ... and employers are undoubtedly worried about that," said Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, an offshoot of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Boston's The Gourmet Pizza must pay for lap-band surgery for Adam Childers, a cook at the store in Schererville, under last month's Indiana ruling that upheld a 4-3 decision by the state's workers' compensation board.

Mr Childers, who was then 25, weighed 340 pounds in March 2007 when he was accidentally struck in the back by a freezer door. Doctors said he needed surgery to ease his severe pain, but that the operation would do him no good unless he first had surgery to reduce his weight, which rose to 380 pounds after the accident.

His employers agreed to pay for the back surgery, but argued they were not obligated to pay for a weight-loss operation that could cost up to $25,000 (£15,000), because Mr Childers was already obese before he was hurt.

The board and the court, however, said the surgery - and disability payments while Mr Childers was unable to work - were covered because his weight and the accident had combined to create a single injury.

They said Boston's didn't present any evidence that his weight had been a medical problem before the accident.

Boston's attorney, Kevin Kearney of South Bend, said the company has asked the court to hear the case again. He declined to comment further. The Dallas-based company, which has more than 50 franchise stores in 25 states, also declined to comment on Wednesday.

Interesting ruling, discuss?

I am off to have a nice hot bath, to ease the pain in my poor old body.


Angus

AnglishLit

Angus Dei-NHS-THE OTHER SIDE

Angus Dei politico

ODDS AND SODS

FAISMESDEVOIRS.COM is a new web site where children will be able to buy answers to simple maths problems for 5 euros (4.40 pounds), while a full end-of-year presentation complete with slides and speaking notes will cost 80 euros.

Agathe Field, a young English teacher at a secondary school in a suburb of Paris said: "It is shocking. It defeats the purpose of education which is that the pupils need to learn for themselves how to do the work,"

Does it add up?


No Spitting in the car.

A SAfrican couple drove 170 Km with a spitting cobra in their car, the driver Gordon Parratt, felt the snake wind itself around his leg while he was driving.

At first he thought an insect had brushed his leg and swiped it away, but when he looked down he saw the snake next to his left foot.

"Its head came up to my knee," he said.

The couple finally managed to call a snake expert to remove the cobra,


Personally I would have been out of the car like a rat up a drainpipe.



Not really in the spirit.

Japanese Buddhist steals statues to pray A Japanese man whose home was found packed with Buddhist statues told police he had stolen some from temples in the ancient capital of Kyoto so he could pray to them, police found 21 statues of Buddha in the 59-year-old's house after he was arrested on suspicion of stealing a wooden Buddha figure from a temple in Kyoto.

Sort of defeats the object.


No farting in the pool.

Underwater critters fart greenhouse gas Scientists at the Max Planck Institut and Denmark's Aarhus University found that mussels, freshwater snails and other underwater creatures release nitrous oxide -- laughing gas -- when nitrate is present in water.

"There's nitrate in water that has been polluted by humans, so the more we pollute, the higher the production of this problematic gas will be," Fanni Aspetsberger from the institute told AFP on Tuesday.

They must be the happiest creatures in the world.


And finally.

Diners threaten to grill Cyprus taverna in bill dispute Disgruntled diners at a taverna in Cyprus opened fire with a shotgun and doused the room in petrol, threatening to torch it after a dispute with the owner over the bill. Skip related content

Three men had quarrelled over a 93 euro (82 pounds) charge for drinks and food at the restaurant in Mesana village, in the west of the Mediterranean island, Sunday night. They offered to pay 50 euros instead.

Two of them left, only to return with a can of petrol and a shotgun, police said.
Shots were fired at the restaurant owner but he was not hit. One man then emptied the petrol over the room and said the other patrons would be burnt alive. Police arrived in time to stop him.

Two men were being questioned Monday and a third who fled was being sought, police said.


I don’t think they have quite got the idea about eating out.

“You can observe a lot by watching.” Yogi Berra

Angus



NHS Behind the headlines

Angus Dei politico