If you’re squeemish, don’t enlarge the picture below. I changed the dressings on my knees this morning and they’re still oozing a bit …
The big scar you can see down the middle is actually two scars from previous surgery. No photo’s of those I’m afraid, they were pretty gruesome. I’ve got some pictures of the inside of my knee that I’ll post when I get round to scanning them in.
I’ve noticed an increasing number of bloggers – myself included – changing their blogging style lately.
Being the nosey bugger that I am, I’ve created a survey on blogging habits.
In the comments on this post, Charlie asked how I’d make people work for a living.
The solution is very simple. Please bear in mind I’m only talking about scroungers who can work but won’t work here.
Why do people sit at home on benefits when they are capable of work? Because they get cash for doing nothing and if and when they are forced to work there is no penalty for having claimed benefits unnecessarily.
In one state in America (California I think), if you go to prison you get billed for your stay. If you work while you’re there that comes off your bill. If you don’t work then you get an invoice when you leave and if you don’t pay it you get sent back to prison.
Imagine a similar system here for benefits. People who are fit for work should be given a grace period of, say, 6 weeks to find a job. If they haven’t found one after 6 weeks they should be allocated a job with the local authority doing things like cleaning graffiti, sweeping roads, etc. If they refuse then they should be given as much as possible of their benefits in food vouchers and just enough cash to pay essential bills. They should then be billed for the benefits they’re receiving and if they still refuse to get a job and pay the bill then the baliffs should be sent in to take their TV, Playstation 3, XBox 360, Nintendo Wii, laptop, DVD player, computer, Sky Plus box, stereo, etc. If they still refuse to get a job and pay up then take them to court and have them banged up like they do for people who won’t pay their council tax.
Pros: local authorities get free labour, keeping down council tax bills and the unemployment rate will drop like a lead balloon.
Cons: ummmmmm …
Technorati Tags: Immigration, Unemployment
A 10 Downing Street petition needs your signature – Hold a general election in 2007.
In order to effectively run the country a prime minister needs the approval that comes with an election. The current prime minister has not been tested by an election. This comprimises his ability to govern effectively as he has no mandate for change. Hold a general election in 2007 to allow England its right to a democratically elected leader.
Go on, sign it, you know you want to! You might want to add “(English Parliament!)” after your name as well – the media are keeping close tabs on this one and it calls for England to have the right to a democratically elected leader.
MP’s have decided to award themselves the privillege of jumping the queue in the Houses of Parliament because they’re all very important and busy people doing very important and busy things.
Access to Services
Before the recess the Speaker approved the Administration Committee’s recommendation that Members should have priority access to services throughout the Commons part of the Parliamentary Estate.With effect from today, staff and other users should be prepared to give way to Members when queuing for retail and catering services, the post office, travel office or when using other facilities such as lifts, photocopiers, telephone cubicles, etc.
When using parliamentary facilities, please bear in mind whether there is, or is likely to be, a heavy demand from Members and, if so, try to amend your own plans or schedule.
Peter Grant Peterkin
Serjeant at ArmsSue Harrison
Director of Catering Services
Hat-tip to Guido and Iain Dale has a list of the self-important, terribly busy MPs on the Administration Committee that issued this order.
The One Eyed Wonder of Wankistan has been lying about the EU not-a-Constitution again.
On Tuesday the European Scrutiny Committee – which is mainly made up of Liebour MPs – said that the EU Reform Treaty is essentially the same as the EU Constitution and to claim that they aren’t basically the same thing is misleading.
David Cameron called on Gordo the Goblin King to honour Liebour’s promise to hold a referendum on the Constitution but the lying, corrupt bastard said no. He said it was the “red lines” that make it different enough to the Constitution not to require a referendum. The treacherous shit has previously said that it was the fact that it amends exsiting treaties instead of replacing them that makes it different enough. Make your fucking mind up Gordon, you two-faced traitor.
The EU Constitution and the Reform Treaty are the same damn thing. They are 92% identical, leaders of other EU member states have said that it’s the same thing, the eurofederalist Nazi bitch Merkel said it’s the same thing, even a committee of eurofederalist Liebour MPs said it’s the same fucking thing. I want my referendum and I want it now.
Technorati Tags: Gordon Brown, EU, Traitor, Constitution
Alistair Darling, the latest Scottish Chancellor of the Exchequer, has announced his first pre-budget review.
In his mini-budget he has decided to double the inheritence tax thresholds for couples, small comfort for those who don’t fall into that bracket – widows, young children who have just lost their parents, etc.
A tax allowance for private equity firms has been abolished resulting in an expected £350m rise in the amount of capital gains tax paid by private equity companies over the next year. Private equity firms are responsible for a large percentage of the insolvent companies rescued, saving jobs and protecting consumers.
Corporation Tax is being cut by 2p to 28% so large companies get to pay less tax.
Local Authority grants for local services will increase to £26bn by 2010 but this will still be preceded by a mandatory cost-cutting exercise in the next financial year which will see council tax bills rise substantially to cover the cuts.
An “extra” £2bn has been given to English health and education. Gordon Brown’s last act as Chancellor was to cut £2bn off the English NHS buildings budget whilst leaving the Scottish and Welsh budget intact. The £2bn “extra” for England will mean extra for Scotland and Wales under the Barnett Formula, further widening the gap between health spending in England compared to the rest of the UK.
Net borrowing will be £23bn by 2012.
£460m is being spent on the British Council (no representation for England of course), the BBC World Service BBC Farsi and Arabic channels. Durka Durka.
So, what can the average man on the street expect to gain from the Tartan Taxman the Second? Bugger all of course, except higher bills and, if you’re English, more discrimination. Why is an MP elected in Scotland deciding how much money should be spent on English health, education, environment, etc? He can’t decide how much is spent in Scotland where he was elected.
Technorati Tags: Alistair Darling, Tax, England, Barnett Formula
It’s simple to display your Skype status on your website or blog, the nice people at Skype even have a web page that will generate the code to do it for you.
What they don’t offer, however, is a way to customise the images displayed for your status so if you want something different you’re buggered.
So, with the (not inconsiderable) help of one of my old Enemy Territory clan-mates, Dave Workman, I’ve done it myself.
<?php
$file = "http://mystatus.skype.com/stuartparr.txt";
system("wget -N $file");
$handle = fopen("stuartparr.txt", "r");
$string = fgets($handle);
$before = ‘<a href="skype:stuartparr">’;
$after = "</a>";
if ($string=="Offline" || $string=="Unknown" || $string=="Do Not Disturb")
{
$before="";
$after="";
}
echo($before.'<img src="http://www.wonkosworld.co.uk/images/skype/’.$string.’.png" />’.$after);
?>
Skype offer various ways of displaying your status, one of which is a text file with your status in it. You access this via the url http://mystatus.skype.com/<username>.txt. The file above tells the operating system to run wgets to retrieve the file at that location. This will only work on a Linux/Unix server unless your Windows server has wgets installed.
After the operating system gets the file, the php script opens the file and then gets the contents and stores them in $string. If the status of Skype is Offline or Unknown then there is no point linking the status icon to Skype you so the next couple of lines check the status and blank out the $quot;before" and "after" text so a link isn’t generated.
The final line actually displays the icon by inserting the contents of the text file into a url for an image.
I’m going to hospital tomorrow to get my knackered knees sorted out again so you probably won’t hear from me for a few days.
No Mandate Brown, the One Eyed Wonder of Wankistan, has decided not to call an election after all.
After seeing the latest batch of opinion polls showing that support for the Conswervatives was increasing whilst support for Liebour was decreasing, he has decided that he “wants a mandate on policy, not on promises”. Or votes for that matter.
God, how I hate that lying, conniving, cheating, unelected, illiberal, disrespectful, cowardly, dictatorial, two-faced turd.
Like I said the other day, the Ignorant Jock shouldn’t have any say whatsoever on when an election is called. An election is an opportunity for the people to give or take away the mandate of the ruling party, not a political tool to be used for the benefit of the party or personal career or the Prime Minister – especially when that Prime Minister has never contested an election as leader of his party and has no right to interfere in domestic policies in England. The timing of elections should be the responsibility of an independent body – the Electoral Commission would be perfect if it could ever be made impartial – and not the ruling party. It’s an absolute sham.
Technorati Tags: Gordon Brown, Elections, Dictators
Now that it’s been announced at the Conference, I can tell you all the good news – Peter Roberts, the man responsible for the biggest petition against any British government, is standing for UKIP in the next election in … the Telford constituency! Peter’s petition against the road pricing tax has made him something of a local celebrity and hopefully Telford residents will take the opportunity to vote for the first decent candidate we’ve had for many years.
Peter is a hard working, down-to-earth local man who found himself thrust into the limelight for standing up for what he believed in and hopefully standing up for what he believes in will see him elected as UKIP’s first MP in the next General Election.
The press release from UKIP is as follows:
One of the foremost internet campaigners of recent times has been selected to stand as a parliamentary candidate for the UK Independence Party. Peter Roberts, who secured 1.8 million signatures for his petition against road pricing, has been selected to contest the Labour-held seat of Telford.
Speaking at the party conference in London, Mr Roberts said he had thrown his hat into the ring because he realised that the politics he believed in were shared by the libertarian party.
“I noticed that large numbers of people who signed my petition against road pricing were members of the UK Independence Party,” he said. “Having gone to a UKIP meeting to speak about my opposition to this stealth tax known as road pricing, I have decided to fight the constituency of Telford so I can take the concerns of the people to Westminster to try to stop this sinister development.
“Already I have helped the campaign in the West Midlands against local and regional road pricing schemes which are being used by the government as a springboard to a national scheme.
“It’s nothing more than an additional tax which is being levied on people who aren’t driving for fun, but driving to get to work. They are doing so because they have to and the way I see it is that they are being penalised for being taxpayers.
“Thankfully, there is one party in this country that doesn’t want sky high taxes and doesn’t want the state to monitor where people are driving to and how fast, which is why I am delighted to be standing for the UK Independence Party.”
West Midlands MEP Mike Nattrass said he was “thrilled” that Mr Roberts was standing for the party:
“He will be a wonderful contribution to our team as we gear up for a general election fight. We want to ensure that people in the West Midlands have a genuine opposition party to vote for, rather than a carbon copy of this hopeless government.”
Technorati Tags: Peter Roberts, UKIP, Telford
… but England are proving to be more than a match for Australia in the first 25 minutes.
Australia have just dropped another scrum, they’re making silly mistakes and England are dominating the offence.
Of course, we’ve seen this all before and experienced the disappointment as England lose focus but at this point in time England are giving Australia a right seeing to!
Jonny Wilkinson’s penalty at 25:26 has just made him the world record holder for penalty kicks in the rugby World Cup.
Edit #1:
England are still dominating but an Australian try means we’re still a point behind. Jonny seems to have picked up an injury and his mojo looks to be fading.
Edit #2:
I thought the authorities were supposed to be cracking down on cock-eyed line outs?
Edit #3:
Australia are making so many mistakes. England should be lifted by Australia’s poor performance.
Edit #4:
Yyyyyyyyyyyeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss! I’ve never been so excited by a rugby match in my life! England played like world champions again.
There are now so many slowpeds in England that a candidate for the Polish Prime Ministership (is that a word?) is canvassing for votes in London.
Twenty polling stations have been set up for Polish voters and the Polish Consul General wants to make sure that nobody has to travel more than 80 miles to cast their vote.
This weekend, four political parties will send representatives from Poland to appear on Polish Radio London.
God help us.
Technorati Tags: England, Poland, Immigration
Firstly, a plug for SimpleTags. Adding Technorati tags is a piece of piss using SimpleTags – no editing involved, just download the plugin, put it in the plugins folder on your web server and activate it. Tagging is simply a case of putting keywords between [tag] tags just like formatting a post in a forum. For example, putting [tag]plugins[/tag] into a post will insert a Technorati tag for “plugins”. Alternatively, you can finish your post with [tags]Technorati, Digg, Del.icio.us[/tags].
One word of warning though – be careful when using inline tags because I found one bug/feature straight away. On the first post I tried tagging, I had a right-aligned image right at the start of the post and tagged the first word. WordPress put the [tag] tags around the image as well as the text which meant that the image was repeated again as part of the Technorati tags it lists at the bottom of the post!
That’s that one out of the way, now on to the social bookmarking bit. You should see three small icons – one for Technorati, one for Digg and one for Del.icio.us. Clicking one of the icons will open a new window allowing you to bookmark the post. Adding more is easy if there’s a need for it. Does anyone use anything other than those three for social bookmarking?
Edit:
Also added an icon to share the post on Facebook.
Technorati Tags: plugins, Technorati, Digg, Del.icio.us, Facebook
Beacon FM are holding a competition to find the best chip shop in Shropshire.
The Flying Fish in Dawley is through to the final four and is currently sitting pretty with 71% of the votes. The Flying Fish came second last year after one of their rivals mysteriously gained several thousand votes in the middle of the night so help them to get to first place this year by voting for the Flying Fish.
Edit:
The Flying Fish is losing its share of the vote – even if you don’t live in Telford, just click the link!
Read this and it’ll all become clear …
Dim oBalls(1) As Object
Set oBalls(0) = LeftTestical
Set oBalls(1) = RightTesticalIf oBalls(1).Left < ScrotalArea.Width / 2 Then oRightHand.Top = oBalls(0).Top + oBalls(0).Height oRightHand.Left = oBalls(0).Left Call CupHand(True) oRightHand.Left = oBalls(0).Left + ((ScrotalArea.Width / 2) + (ScrotalArea.TwipsPerPube * 10)) Call CupHand(False) Call MsgBox("Ahh, much better!", vbOkOnly + vbExclamation, "Balls Moved") Else Call MsgBox("Balls already right-aligned!", vbOkOnly + vbInformation, "Balls Not Moved") End If
UKIP will announce an immigration policy at this weeks party conference that will ban all immigration for 5 years, after which time immigration will be allowed again with restrictions on who can come in.
This is the kind of immigration policy people have been crying out for for years but none of the parties have had the balls to come out with. Immigration is a problem and the only way to deal with it is to introduce a points-based system like that used in places like Australia and Canada where your suitability for immigration is determined by whether you speak the language, have a job and/or have a useful skill.
Of course, there is one very important pre-requisite to changing immigration policy and that is to leave the EU. We can’t stop slowpeds from Eastern Europe coming over because of EU rules. We can’t put in proper border controls to stop France accidently letting immigrants onto the Eurostar because of EU rules. We can’t send asylum seekers back to the first friendly country they arrived in because of EU rules. We can’t stick asylum seekers on prison ships until their claims are processed because of EU rules.
The One Eyed Wonder of Wankistan, Minge Campbell and Call Me Dave are all eurofederalists. The Tories want to be “in Europe but not run by Europe” but this simply isn’t possible. Membership of the EU requires a transfer of sovereignty and compliance with the stated aims of the EU – the creation of a European Federation. The Schuman Declaration, the treaty that established what has now become the European Union, declared it to be the first step towards a Federal Europe.
Technorati Tags: UKIP, immigration, European Union
As previously revealed, if you send an Evesham laptop back to Eveshambles for repair, they are no longer sent to Micronano who previously did their repairs for them.
Thanks to another dissatisfied customer and a Micronano insider, I now know why – Eveshambles ordered 250 laptop keyboards from Micronano days before going into voluntary administration and the new not-Evesham-if-you’ve-got-a-bill-that-needs-paying-but-is-Evesham-if you-want-to-buy-something company haven’t paid the bill.
It is for this reason, and not cost-cutting measures, that Eveshambles are now carrying out sub-standard repairs in-house using stock that Micronano haven’t been paid for!
The question now is what are Eveshambles going to do when the stock they got from Micronano runs out? They don’t have a contract with Mitac, the company who made the laptops, any more because they haven’t paid them either.
Technorati Tags: Evesham
Zimbabwe, suffering from the highest rate of inflation in the world, has decided to put up interest rates to stop inflation from rising.
Mugabe doesn’t believe in messing about with a quarter of a percent here and there though, it’s gone up 150% to 800%. The official rate of inflation is currently running at 6,600% per year but the real rate is nearer 11,000% meaning Zimbabweans simply can’t afford to buy even the most basic of goods produced in their own country, let alone imported.
The question is, why? Why has Mugabe destroyed the Zimbabwean economy and taken such steps as forcing shops to sell goods below cost price when the situation is clearly not sustainable? Mugabe is a Marxist (aka Communist) and, to me, it looks like he’s preparing the country for communism. By making businesses sell good at less than cost price they will eventually run out of cash and the state will take them over. This will, of course, be done to protect the economy and ensure the continuance of food supplies but it will be a classic Marxist move from private enterprise to state ownership for the good of the people, a fact that will be beaten into anyone who doesn’t see the benefits of the new system by Mugabe’s private army.
Maybe then the “international community” will do something about Zimbabwe. After all, America is only interested in bombing oil producers and commies.
