Boris does the sub-continent: Up your VAT: 'Temperature tolerant chocolate': Reckless electricity: Eternal Tardigrades: and a Squeaky brat.

Bathfuls of sky water, bothersome atmospheric movement, blissful amounts of lack of warm and bugger all solar stuff at the Castle this morn, following yestermorn’s battle with the Giant Flying Freudian Penis and tethering it dahn to the patio I was kept awake by wet stuff dripping on it all night.

Still watching updates being “installed” on the “new” desktop and have just returned from the stale bread, gruel and his Maj’s food and “Dreamies” run dahn Tesco.

 

And his Maj has discovered the joy of a nice warm TV screen.

 

East to the land of warm weather and Boris

Apparently the Mayor of the Smoke has begun a six-day tour of India to promote business links.

He said the UK could no longer rely on the colonial sentiments of the past as it seeks to build new business links with India.

Boris Johnson said to simply rely on India's history with the UK "simply didn't cut the mustard".

BJ began his tour visiting the Akshardham Hindu temple, before heading to India Gate, in Delhi.

He was greeted by monks with a garland of rose petals and the traditional kanku - with the red dot daubed on his forehead.

But a bemused Indian local mistook him for Wimbledon legend Boris Becker.

Akash Bharadia, 18, who is spending his gap year volunteering at the temple, said: "One of the locals shouted out it was Boris Becker while some people asked whether he was the King of England.

 

Nah: It’s the king of cock-ups; there goes any hope of trade with the sub Continent.

 

And according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies

Son of a B.....aronet and alien reptile in disguise George (I enjoyed the sus anal bum party) Osborne is so bleedin bad at his attempts to do his job that he may have to raise VAT to 25% to balance the budget.

Weak economic growth and lower than expected tax payments have left a hole in the Chancellor’s plans that may need to be filled by higher taxes or further cuts to public spending, the Institute for Fiscal Studies said.

Even under the most “optimistic” forecast, the Chancellor will miss his target for debt to fall between 2015 and 2016 and should abandon the goal, the IFS said.

But a more pessimistic assessment suggests that Mr Osborne will also fail to achieve his key “fiscal mandate”, which is to balance the budget within five years, the IFS said.

If the current weak growth and low tax receipts are permanent, the Chancellor will need another £23 billion of tax rises or spending cuts to be on course to meet his mandate by 2018, the report said.

The think-tank said this would be “roughly equivalent to increasing the main rate of VAT from 20 per cent to 25 per cent”, or imposing even deeper welfare cuts than announced so far.

 

Nice work you useless twonk...

 

In the Chocosphere

Cadbury’s scientists have come up with a new kind of chocolate that stays solid in the most sweltering temperatures.

The newly invented Dairy Milk bars can remain in boiling temperatures of up to 104 degrees for more than three hours before even starting to soften up

Engineers at the Cadbury’s research and development plant in Bourneville have set out their revolutionary technique for making the ‘temperature tolerant chocolate’ in an 8,000 word patent application.

The secret to the new bars is a change in the so-called 'conching step' - where a container filled with metal beads grinds the ingredients, which usually include cocoa butter, vegetable oils, milk and sugar.

Scientists has developed a way of breaking down sugar particles into smaller pieces, reducing how much fat covers them and making the bar more resistant to heat

 The only snag is that Cadbury’s confectionary invention will not be available to Brits – even when the weather starts to warm up, it will only be available in tropical countries thought to include India and Brazil.

 

With our wevver I don’t think it will make much difference....

 

Norf of the border

A Dundee man is facing court accused of “recklessly producing household electricity” with a bizarre homemade transformer, a court heard today.

Charles McKenzie is alleged to have rigged up a “dangerous transformer assembly” at his flat in Dundee’s Dudhope Court.

It is alleged he “culpably and recklessly” produced electricity “with total disregard for the safety of yourself and others”.

Fiscal depute Laura Bruce said: “The Crown’s position is that he had this man-made assembly in his house suspended from the ceiling by thin ropes.

“There was a car battery and cans of petrol nearby.”

 

Shocking....

 

The secret of immortality

 

You probably know this but:

There are creatures called Tardigrades which were put out into open vacuum space and solar radiation for ten days, and survived. Some of the ones that died managed to mysteriously resurrect themselves

Commonly known as waterbears or moss piglets they are small, water-dwelling, segmented animals with eight legs. They form the phylum Tardigrada, and part of the superphylum Ecdysozoa. It's an ancient group, with fossils dating from 530 million years ago, in the Cambrian period. The first Tardigrades were discovered by Johann August Ephraim Goeze in 1773. Since 1778, over 500 new tardigrade species have been found.

Usually, Tardigrades are 1mm when they are fully grown. They are short and plump with 4 pairs of poorly articulated lobopodial limbs. Each limb has 4-8 claws also known as disks. Tardigrades all possess a buccopharyngeal membrane apparatus, which, along with the claws, are used to differentiate the different species. Tardigrades are covered in cuticle which contains chitin and protein.

Knew there would be a snag....

 

And finally:

 

Left to the Big Apple

 

Family and teachers thought 7-year-old Hector Flores Jr. of New York was playing a trick on them when they heard him making a squeaking sound.

Turns out, the boy had swallowed a whistle from his plastic toy duck nearly a month ago.

His family took him to the emergency room and doctors were able to remove the whistle piece from Hector's lung.

 

Quackers....

 

That’s it: I’m orf to Oxfordshire to check out the synchrotron.

 

And today’s thought:

Blighty export

 

 

Angus

Who’s who does a “U” at number 10: Water stressed Blighty: We don’t want to live forever: Stephen Hawking-no heaven: Pencil sharpener museum: and the Owl and the Pussycat.

Quite sunny, warmish, calmish and still dry at the Castle this morn, no rain again for more than a couple of days, the lawn is reverting to a nice brown colour and the twice daily wetting of the pots, wall boxes and the borders continues.

The kitchen is overflowing with non computers and the new resident is settling in nicely.

Up in the house of horrors

Correspondence from Downing Street officials will no longer be signed with fake names, U-Turn Cam has said.

The policy change follows a complaint from Labour MP Sir Gerald Kaufman after he received a letter signed by "Mrs E Adams", only to be told it was a computer-generated pseudonym.

The use of false names on letters from No 10 began in 2005 in response to a security threat.

But the prime minister said this would "no longer" be the case.

In the Commons last week, Sir Gerald revealed how he had written to Mr Cameron at the request of a constituent and received a reply from 10 Downing Street signed "Mrs E Adams, direct communications unit".

In a written reply, the prime minister said: "Correspondence was handled under arrangements put in place in 2005 when on security advice, following an incident in which a member of staff was personally targeted and threatened; members of staff were advised not to use their names.

"After review this approach will no longer be used."

The non anonymous Gov.

Drought on the way

Caroline Spelman said that water companies’ drought preparations are being reviewed as several areas of the country are already “water stressed”.

She met with farm leaders yesterday who have warned the Government that this year’s food harvest will be earlier and the yield lower. The situation could force up food prices even higher, farming experts warned, with the price of vegetables particularly likely to be affected later this year.

According to the latest inflation figures from the Office for National Statistics, food prices are already 4 per cent higher than a year ago.

England and Wales has recorded the lowest rainfall in March and April since 1938 with the warmest spring in centuries. The water levels in some rivers are already being compared to those during the record drought of 1976.

In some eastern counties just 5mm of water has fallen since the end of February.

Last night, Mrs Spelman admitted that the dry weather has caused “irreversible” damage on agriculture but insisted “we don’t have a drought yet”.

But that won’t stop “Them” from putting the prices up.             

Four score years and ten

Only 15% of people would like to live forever and just 9% would like to live to more than 100, according to new research.

The most common age at which people would like to die is aged 81-90 (27%), with younger people more likely than older people to want to live forever, the study found.

Although most people think that talking about death is less of a taboo than it was 20 years ago, two thirds agree that people in Britain are uncomfortable discussing dying and death, the research commissioned by the Dying Matters Coalition found.

OH shit! Another thirty years to go……..

And according to Mr S Hawking

Heaven is a “fairy story for people afraid of the dark”.

The 69 year-old physicist, who was diagnosed with motor neurone disease at the age of 21, insisted that he is “not afraid of death”.

Shortly after being diagnosed with the incurable illness many expected the author of A Brief History of Time to die.

But he said it has instead led him to enjoy life more.

In an interview with The Guardian, ahead of key note speech on Tuesday, Prof Hawking discusses his thoughts on death.

He rejected the idea of life beyond death and emphasised, what he described as the need to fulfil our potential on Earth by making good use of our lives.

 

Easy for him to say, he sits about on his arse all day.

Over to Ohio

Tourism officials in the United States have made a display out of the thousands of pencil sharpeners collected by an Ohio minister who died last year.

The Reverend Paul Johnson kept his collection of 3400 sharpeners in a small shed he called his museum.

He started it after his wife gave him a few sharpeners as a gift in the late 1980s. He kept them organised in categories, including cats, Christmas and Disneyland. 

Can’t wait to visit that….. 

And finally:

Another YouTube snippet.

That’s it: I’m orf to study some Tarantulas-with a rolled up newspaper.

And today’s thought: "The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any" - Alice Walker. 

Angus

Heavens above; Mrs Numpty; Mass theft and Immortality

Bit of a short one today (I blame the cold weather) because I have an early appointment at the dentist.

But a couple of news snips-Sydney has turned orange, and the BBC is arrogant, nothing new there then.

So straight to it.


First up:

Divine intervention

Gunther Link prayed for release when he was trapped in a lift, a short while later he was pulled out of the elevator and being a devout Catholic went straight to the church to thank God and was killed when the 860lb altar fell on him.

Link was reported missing by his cousin, and found the next day by parishioners going to Mass at the Weinhaus Church in Vienna.

Hahslinger concluded: "He seems to have embraced a stone pillar on which the stone altar was perched and it fell on him, killing him instantly. We have found his fingerprints on the pillar. We are now investigating the case further."


Thank God I’m an agnostic.

Beauty is only skin deep

And so is a tattoo across your forehead, Karolyne Smith has to live with a permanent billboard on her forehead after she accepted Goldenpalace.com's offer of $10,000 for the 'advertising space'. She needed the money to send her son Brady to a private school.Karolyne said: ""I really want to do this. To everyone else, it seems like a stupid thing to do. To me, $10,000 is like a million dollars.""I only live once and I'm doing it for my son. It's a small sacrifice to build a better future for my son."

Smith's eBay auction attracted more than 27,000 hits and 1,000 watchers. Bidding reached $999.99 before Goldenpalace.com; an Internet gambling company met Smith's $10,000 asking price. Goldenpalace.com also gave her another $5,000 for her trouble.Another person, inspired by Karolyne is currently auctioning his forehead as ad space on eBay.

And this tattoo isn’t going to embarrass her son at all when she turns up at his private school to collect him is it?

DVD dipper takes 30,000

A former postal service employee has pleaded guilty to stealing more than 30,000 DVDs that moved through a western Massachusetts post office.

Myles Weathers, formerly of Springfield, took DVDs that were mailed by Netflix to customers for a year beginning in January 2007.

Federal prosecutors say the movie rental company alerted Springfield post office officials that a suspiciously high number of DVDs were disappearing. As many as 100 movies a week were disappearing.

Weathers was arrested in February 2008 after investigators filmed him taking DVDs from packages and slipping them into his backpack.

He faces 10 months to 16 months in prison and restitution costs of about $38,000 at his Dec. 23 sentencing.

Weathers' attorney did not immediately return a call seeking comment Tuesday.

Just over $1 per DVD, so why do I have to pay £10 each for mine?

And finally:

Just my bleedin luck

Scientist Ray Kurzweil claims humans could become immortal in as little as 20 years' time through nanotechnology and an increased understanding of how the body works.

The 61-year-old American, who has predicted new technologies arriving before, says our understanding of genes and computer technology is accelerating at an incredible rate.

He says theoretically, at the rate our understanding is increasing, nanotechnologies capable of replacing many of our vital organs could be available in 20 years time.

Mr Kurzweil calls his theory the Law of Accelerating Returns. Writing in The Sun, Mr Kurzweil said: "I and many other scientists now believe that in around 20 years we will have the means to reprogramme our bodies' stone-age software so we can halt, then reverse, ageing. Then nanotechnology will let us live for ever.

"Ultimately, nanobots will replace blood cells and do their work thousands of times more effectively.

"Within 25 years we will be able to do an Olympic sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath, or go scuba-diving for four hours without oxygen.

"Heart-attack victims – who haven't taken advantage of widely available bionic hearts – will calmly drive to the doctors for a minor operation as their blood bots keep them alive.

"Nanotechnology will extend our mental capacities to such an extent we will be able to write books within minutes.

This would mean I would be 78, and who wants to be 78 for ever.

Angus:

AnglishLit

Angus Dei-NHS-THE OTHER SIDE

Angus Dei politico